Kindle Edition, 2013 © The New Yorker

COMMENT
Options

by Steve Coll

The carved minaret above Aleppo’s twelfth-century Umayyad Mosque collapsed in April. The city, which is Syria’s most populous, has endured Hittite, Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman rule, little of it benevolent. But this year, forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have delivered a distinctly modern form of terror, one the British pioneered in Iraq, in the nineteen-twenties, then endured in the London Blitz: the bombing of civilians, to break their will.

Tom Malinowski, of Human Rights Watch, visited the region last winter, and in March he described to a Senate subcommittee the siege imposed by Assad’s forces as they battle Aleppo’s anti-government rebels:

When aircraft appear in the sky, there is no warning and nowhere to hide. Each day people just wake up and wish for bad weather. . . . Each local council faces dilemmas: Should schools be kept closed, denying children an education, or should they be opened, taking the chance that an air strike could kill dozens of kids? . . . Should people be asked to pick up their daily bread at bakeries, as they traditionally have done, even though government forces have repeatedly bombed bakeries as civilians lined up outside?

The Obama Administration recently announced that it intends to ship small arms to vetted Syrian rebel groups in the hope that, as the President told Charlie Rose, a stronger armed opposition might create a “counterweight” to Assad, and “potentially lead to political negotiations” to end the war.

The President made plain that he was reluctant to send even light weapons, and he warned against any “slip-slide” into “deeper and deeper commitments” to aid Syria’s rebels or civilians. Yet his decision marks an escalation of American involvement, and it has provoked unease that the United States will shuffle into yet another dreadful Middle East war. Syria’s civil conflict has now become deadlier than Iraq’s was at its nadir, in 2006. More than ninety thousand Syrians have died so far.

Assad has overseen the most directed, widespread killing of civilians by state forces since the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s militias rampaged through Darfur a decade ago. Syrian rebels have committed kidnappings and murders, but their violations pale beside those of the government forces. According to recent assessments by American intelligence agencies, Syrian commanders have used chemical arms on multiple occasions, killing at least a hundred people. If proved, this would be the first case of such barbarity since Saddam Hussein ordered Kurds and Iranians gassed more than two decades ago.

President Obama’s stated goal is for Assad to relinquish power, and for Syrians to negotiate a peace among the dictator’s minority Alawite community; the Sunni majority, from which the rebels draw their strength; and the country’s Christians, Kurds, and other minorities. Yet the Administration’s plan to achieve that goal is vague, and there are many unaddressed questions. If a settlement is reached, whose troops will secure it? Diplomacy has so far yielded little progress; if that failure continues, then what? Would Obama ever set a hard deadline for Assad’s departure and back it with force?

“I want to understand the outcome that we believe we are trying to encourage,” General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April, sounding more befuddled about Administration policy than the President’s principal military adviser should. He added, “And once I understand the outcome, I can take the toolbox I have got, and I can probably provide an option or two or three.”

Obama could probably use four or five or six options, particularly to protect Syria’s civilians from mass attacks and to rescue them when protection fails; to prevent chemical warfare; and to hold Syrian war criminals to account. Those priorities do not necessarily require further military escalation. Meanwhile, humanitarian aid to rebel areas is inadequate. The United States is spending more than any other country to help refugees, yet United Nations budgets to provide for the estimated million and a half Syrians who have fled to neighboring countries remain underfunded.

The President’s decision to supply guns introduces new risks. Syria’s armed opposition is fractious and increasingly sectarian, and it includes groups aligned with Al Qaeda. Arms in wartime trade as easily as silks in a souk, and it must be assumed that any weapons given to approved rebels can find their way to less reliable ones. The C.I.A. provided potent anti-aircraft missiles to Islamist fighters during the Afghan war of the nineteen-eighties, and its officers were still hunting down stray missiles years later, lest they be used by terrorists against civilian airliners. In any event, delivering crates of rifles to select rebels is unlikely to keep civilians safe or to intimidate a dictator who enjoys a monopoly of air power and is willing to gas citizens and shell bakery lines.

A bolder option would be to establish a humanitarian corridor in Syria’s north, including Aleppo, where civilians could shelter. The United States, Britain, France, Turkey, and perhaps other countries could send warplanes to stop Assad’s artillery and bombing attacks in a defined area by enforcing a no-fly zone and by helping rebels to defend the zone’s perimeter—without putting foreign troops on the ground. Between 1991 and 2003, the United States engaged in something similar in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, for the most part successfully, but at high financial cost.

Obama argued against this option to Charlie Rose. Just ten per cent of civilian deaths in Syria are the result of air strikes, the President noted, and protecting a humanitarian zone might require bombing Damascus, causing more deaths. Obama is clearly anguished about his menu of terrible-to-awful options. Earlier this year, during an interview with The New Republic, he asked, “How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?”

It is a poignant question, though the comparison is inexact: The United States should work to ameliorate all major humanitarian crises, but Syria’s is such a crisis and more. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s militias are the detritus of a long-failed state. Assad’s belong to a still coherent dictatorship allied with Hezbollah and Iran. Congo occupies a vast and underpopulated area of southern Africa. Syria borders Israel, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq—all American allies, whose interests are threatened by Syria’s implosion.

Two years ago, Obama explained his decision to support the deployment of NATO fighter jets to protect civilians in the much less complicated case of Libya. “When the entire international community almost unanimously says that there is a potential humanitarian crisis about to take place,” he said, “we can’t simply stand by with empty words.” He added, “We have to take some sort of action.” It will be the President’s burden during the months ahead to square that pledge with Assad’s resilience and Syria’s escalating violence. Whatever option he chooses, he surely knows that in Aleppo, and in scores of other Syrian towns and villages with less storied histories, the time of “potential” calamity is long past. ♦

AROUND CITY HALL
Ringers

by Reeves Wiedeman

Of the forty-seven committees and task forces that make up the New York City Council—Hospital Closings, Waterfronts, Aging—few are less glamorous than the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises. It has ten members, more than Sanitation and Solid Waste Management but fewer than Youth Services. At last week’s meeting, the group was scheduled to discuss “a special permit pursuant to Section 74-41” of the city’s zoning regulations. Those testifying included the New York Building Congress, the Real Estate Board, and Spike Lee, who entered the council chambers in black shoes with bright-blue soles and introduced himself as “a filmmaker from the Republic of Brooklyn.”

Lee was at City Hall on behalf of Madison Square Garden and its owners, who were fighting a push to move their arena elsewhere, to make room for a more accommodating, less Dantean version of Penn Station. Earlier this year, the City Planning Commission cut the Garden’s operating permit to fifteen years, subject to council approval, after which the Knicks and the Rangers could be forced to find a new home. The council is expected to vote next month. M.S.G.’s opponents want the permit reduced to ten years; the Garden’s leadership wants it extended indefinitely, and, in addition to Lee, they had invited several former Knicks to augment their team of lawyers and executives. “Now, this is just unfair,” Mark Weprin, the subcommittee chair, said, as Lee high-fived John Starks, the former Knicks point guard, and sat next to Earl Monroe and Walt (Clyde) Frazier, members of the last Knicks team to win an N.B.A. championship, in 1973. They took the front row, leaving the audience with an obstructed view. Each wore a sensible dark suit, save for Frazier, who looked, in pale green with an orange pocket square, like a dollar bill smeared with pizza grease. The Hall of Fame Ranger Rod Gilbert was there to court the hockey vote. Outgunned, a representative for groups pushing for a new Penn Station pointed out that Bette Midler had recently tweeted in support of their cause.

“I’d like to welcome everybody, including the backcourt,” Weprin said, before admitting that he once had a picture of Frazier on his bedroom wall. He insisted, however, that the council could not be swayed by star power, and emphasized that a tan fedora with a blue-and-orange band on the council’s table belonged to five-year-old Adrian Reyna, who was accompanying his mother, Diana, the councilwoman for portions of Ridgewood, Williamsburg, and Bushwick, and was not meant as an homage to the Knicks’ color scheme.

After half an hour devoted to rezoning several neighborhoods in Queens, Weprin called the executives from M.S.G. to present testimony. The zoning weeds were thick: fee interest, building rights, superblocks. Adrian Reyna kept his eyes glued to an app on his mother’s phone. Lee was on his own device; he tweeted about the previous night’s N.B.A. finals game, and the fact that Ray Allen, who played Jesus Shuttlesworth in Lee’s “He Got Game,” had hit the game-tying shot. Weprin then introduced a panel in opposition, which offered several alternative Garden sites, among them a postal facility in Chelsea and somewhere near the Javits Center. Lee remained unmoved—the tweets kept coming—but raised his eyebrows when the executive director of the Working Families Party referred to the Garden as a “monumentally ugly building.” Reyna, meanwhile, had begun stripping a piece of string cheese.

Two hours and fifty tweets—all about the game—after the hearing began, Lee stepped to the microphone. He presented the Garden’s story in terms of his own. “My father used to take me to the old Garden. . . . I was up with my student-government card in the blue seats,” he said. “I got my season tickets the day after we got Patrick Ewing. So I was in the blue as a kid, and I worked my way down to courtside.” He compared the Garden to MOMA, the Met, and Lincoln Center, listing the basketball greats who had come through and apologizing to Gilbert for not knowing any hockey players.

“I don’t mean to cut you off,” Weprin jumped in, after Lee had exhausted his allotted time. “We have a lot in common, actually. I’m still in the blue seats.”

“You gotta make some movies, bro,” Lee said.

“I did have the Puma sneakers,” Weprin said. “Did you ever have the Puma sneakers?”

“Yes, I did,” Lee said. “Clyde had ’em! Before Nike came, I was wearing Pumas.” He turned and gave Frazier a fist bump.

The council had no further questions for Lee, but there were ninety more minutes of testimony: emissaries from Albany, a carpenter who once built a stage in the Garden for the Bolshoi Ballet. Reyna moved on to a bag of pistachios, while Lee slipped out a side door with Monroe and Frazier. Starks took the civilian exit, and several members of the communications workers’ union met him outside. They were there to lobby against the Garden, but couldn’t resist taking his picture. ♦

DEPT. OF BREAKTHROUGHS
Unsung

by Tad Friend

Darlene Love, a tiny dynamo with golden ringlets, peered at a black-and-white photograph on the wall of her dressing room at the Ed Sullivan Theatre, where “Late Show with David Letterman” tapes. She tapped a dim figure and said, “That’s Claudia.” Only a knowing eye would have noticed, behind Tina Turner performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the backup singer Claudia Lennear go-going in the background. But Love, too, was a backup singer—perhaps the greatest of them all. And that evening she and her unsung profession were finally going to emerge from the shadows. Letterman would be interviewing her about “20 Feet from Stardom,” a new documentary about the women whose harmonies make pop songs pop.

Love’s longtime publicist, Len Evans, said that he never thought they’d see this day: “For years, nobody would touch Darlene Love. I had to beg.”

“That’s all a hurdle is,” Love, who had a heart attack last year, calmly replied. “Something to get over.”

“Remember to tell Dave you’re working, you’re hot, it’s not just the movie.”

“Hello! My calendar is full! At age seventy-one!”

Beginning in high school, Love, a preacher’s daughter, brought guts to the previously all-white world of vocal accompaniment, sassing up hits from “Monster Mash” to “That’s Life.” In the early sixties, she was the powerhouse voice behind the hits “He’s a Rebel” and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love”—but the producer Phil Spector, who had changed her last name from Wright to Love, further engineered matters so that another of his groups, the Crystals, got all the credit.

Twenty years later, divorced and broke, Love was cleaning a rich woman’s bathroom in Beverly Hills when she heard “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on the radio—another of her songs for Spector. She saw this as a sign that she should resume her career. In 1986, the first break of her second chance came when Letterman, who loved the song, invited her to perform it on his Christmas show. That became an annual tradition. But the leap from backup to star is no larger than the gulf between singing on Letterman’s show and chatting by his side.

Evans suggested, “Make it a moment—when you finally sit in the chair, after twenty-seven years—touch the chair, touch the desk.”

“I planned on doing that!” Love said.

“I hope he flirts with you, talks about your legs.” Love gave her legs a satisfied glance. Then Evans asked, “Do you think Phil Spector knows what’s happened with you?”

“Believe me!”

“He must be going crazy, because he wanted to control you, your whole life.”

Love shook her head. “Where he is, right now? I’ve got closure.” (Spector is serving time for second-degree murder.) “But it was because of him that I never loved the business as much as I maybe should have. If I had to choose between this business and death? I would do what Jesus did.”

In the doorway stood her husband, Alton Allison, who was once Letterman’s limo driver. Love admitted, “I’m as nervous right this minute as I’ve ever been.” Watching a video feed from the stage, where Paul Shaffer and the band were ripping through “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” she shimmied on the arm of her chair, in a purple dress, mouthing the refrain. She began singing the hook softly, then belting out all the words.

Suddenly confident, she gathered her six backup singers—“C’mon, chirren, c’mon, chirren!”—and sailed downstairs. Onstage, Letterman kissed her hand, and they fell into an easy intimacy. When he asked whether Elvis Presley ever pursued her, she recalled that Presley once invited her to his dressing room and said, “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but I’ve never thought about having a black lady.” Backstage, her husband covered his face, then peeped through his fingers. Love gave a long, Mae West-style look around before adding, “And he didn’t have me.”

Letterman wondered whether we should feel sorry for Elvis. Then he played the clip from the documentary in which Love talks about hearing “Christmas” when she was cleaning houses. After a commercial break, Love crossed the stage, and she and her troupe raised the roof with a gospel version of “Lean on Me.” Letterman, usually the stiffest and whitest of men, hugged her and cried, “That was better than church!”

Upstairs, Love changed out of her high heels and into slippers, beaming. “When the clip was getting to where ‘Christmas’ is about to play, Dave was whispering, ‘Here it comes! Here it comes!’ And, afterward, he said, ‘My God, my God!,’ and he gave me another kiss.” She laughed. “Dave kissed me more tonight than he has in all the years.” ♦

BIG BROTHER DEPT.
Mask Crusader

by Alec Wilkinson

Amid the recent discourse over surveillance, a woman named Heather Dewey-Hagborg delivered a talk in Brooklyn called “Stranger Visions,” which was sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and by Genspace, a D.I.Y. bio lab on Flatbush Avenue. The talk concentrated on Dewey-Hagborg’s portraits in the form of realistic masks. The masks are derived from DNA collected from cigarette butts and chewing gum that Dewey-Hagborg finds on the street; using software and facial-recognition programs, she reconstructs her subjects’ faces. Four of her masks were on display—a white woman, a white man, a Latino man (the chewing gum), and a man with African ancestry. The resemblances are approximate. “Accuracy is not the point,” she said. “It’s not a scientific study about how to construct faces from DNA. It’s a provocation meant to make you think about privacy.”

The program’s announcement described Dewey-Hagborg as an information artist. She is thirty-one. As an art major at Bennington, she got interested in machine learning, and in graduate school, at N.Y.U., she also studied artificial intelligence. “That got me interested in surveillance,” she said, before the talk. “My pieces at N.Y.U. dealt with facial-recognition algorithms. It’s a different version of appropriating. Instead of Duchamp signing a urinal, it’s taking something and making it do something it wasn’t intended to do.”

At N.Y.U., Dewey-Hagborg began wondering, What would a facial-recognition system dream about? “It would generate weird faces,” she concluded. “After that, I got more involved in the political side of things, trying to understand public systems like cameras and facial-recognition programs. Two years ago, I was sitting in therapy, and I was staring at this framed print on the wall, and there was a hair in the glass. As I went home, I noticed all these things—cigarette butts and chewing gum and drinking glasses—that people leave around. I thought, How much can I know of someone by what he or she leaves behind?”

To find out, Dewey-Hagborg took a crash course in biotechnology at Genspace, from which she learned to extract and analyze DNA. She was “astonished,” she said, “to see how much an amateur like me could learn about someone.” She went on, “A portrait seemed like a natural form for expressing this.”

She examines a specific series of traits: “I have a master list of fifty characteristics I’m interested in. Ancestry: I can tell if you have African ancestry or European, but I can’t tell precise shades of darkness. From other parts of the genome, I can get some information about the dimensions of a person’s face—small things about whether your eyes are close together or farther apart; other things, like eye color, or if you might have freckles. Gender, of course, and whether you might be overweight. I know a certain number of things, but I could push to know more.”

A mask takes a day to print—Dewey-Hagborg uses a 3-D printer at N.Y.U. She collected most of the DNA samples near her apartment, in Bushwick; one of the cigarette butts, a menthol, came from Flatbush Avenue, near Genspace. “I’ve collected five menthols in the same spot, so I’m thinking this guy must smoke here a lot,” she said. To collect them, she puts on a rubber glove and places the sample in a plastic bag. “Following someone for a sample is too creepy,” she said. She wanted to use hair samples, but discovered that unless they are taken almost directly from someone’s head they degrade too quickly. Rain ruins cigarette butts, and gum that has been stepped on is probably too old to be useful.

Dewey-Hagborg said, “We’re having this big discussion about DNA and wiretapping now, but five years ago insiders knew what was possible.” She went on, “I was just talking at a conference in Minnesota, and I said, ‘If you care about privacy, you’d better do something, because we are probably the last generation that will realize what we’re losing.’ ” ♦

SECOND CHILDHOOD
Round and Round

by Ian Parker

Like Frédéric Bartholdi, the designer of the Statue of Liberty, Francis Staub, the designer of an enamelled iron cooking pot in the shape of a cow, was born in Colmar, in eastern France. One morning a few weeks ago, Staub was in New York, for discussions about his own gift to New York Harbor—the loan of vintage French carrousels to Governors Island. On his way to catch a ferry there, he visited Sur La Table, the kitchen-supply store in SoHo, where he stopped in front of a display of heavy black pots that bore his name. He described the highs and lows of a career in cookware, while keeping his back to the Le Creuset. Staub, who is about sixty, had the air of a lounge singer at peace with a hangover. His laugh was a repetition of the word “yak.”

He formed his company in the nineteen-seventies, after film school and some bit-part acting in movies, including, he said, “Darling Lili,” directed by Blake Edwards. “After I started the company, so much money. I bought a Porsche. I had a head so wide I can’t go under the Arc de Triomphe.” Then microwaves appeared: “Jesus Christ!” Microwaves nearly ruined him. In the nineties, cast-iron pots became popular again, Staub said, thanks largely to the innovation of induction stovetops. “Induction!” he cried out, and raised a celebratory finger. In 2008, he sold the company. “I’m a free man. Freedom, freedom.” He seemed to be inching toward George Michael. “You know the song.”

On Spring Street, Staub caught a taxi downtown. “Children, no,” he said, in a brief biographical résumé. “Gay, no. Married, no. Never! Impossible to sign a contract like that. You belong to me and I belong to you? Nobody belongs to nobody!” He has an apartment in Paris and a house in Saint-Tropez. He plans to open a restaurant in Queens, which he described as “the countryside.” He keeps his automobile collection in a hundred-thousand-square-foot warehouse in his home district of Alsace. “Old Jaguars, old Mercedes, old Range Rover—the first one.” He added, “I hate Maserati. I hate Ferrari.”

In 2011, a private collection of antique fairground art came up for auction in Paris, and Staub was entranced. “I thought, Mamma mia! ” He bought about two hundred and fifty pieces, including “four or five” small working carrousels; several wheels of fortune; some carrousel animals, including two giraffes; and, for about a hundred thousand dollars, a line of caricatured heads of Charlie Chaplin, Josephine Baker, and others, into whose mouths people threw balls in the nineteen-thirties. He imagined installing some of this in Colmar, “in a huge old factory: people dancing around these carrousels.” But the idea was underappreciated, he said. “A lot of Catholic people”—he crossed himself and laughed—“without any imagination.” He turned his attention to a possible fairground festival in New York.

It was lunchtime, and there had been talk of a picnic. At the Battery Maritime Building, on South Street, Staub met his team of American and French event planners; together they boarded a ferry to Governors Island, which had not yet opened to the public for the summer. On the other side, Leslie Koch, the president of the trust for Governors Island, led her visitors to a grassy area. For three months starting on July 6th, a few dozen items from Staub’s collection will be arranged on this lawn. A bumper-car structure, from 1900, will serve as a bar.

Then Koch sat down on the grass; Staub looked at her in amazement. He was dressed informally but with care: gray shoes, partially laced and worn without socks; narrow dark pants; a baggy gray sweatshirt over a cream shirt. Muttering, he borrowed a magazine and, with some Jacques Tati-like commotion, opened it and sat down cross-legged on Brad Pitt’s smile. One of his colleagues had brought bottles of beer to the island, against regulations, and these were opened with the use of a twig. Staub objected to drinking from the bottle and sent for glasses.

Koch had been trying to come up with a name for the festival, and wondered if it might include the word “plaisir.”

“It’s not only pleasure,” Staub said. “It’s a carrousel story. The name is ‘Carrousel Story.’ ”

“ ‘Carrousel Story’?”

“Because it’s culture, Leslie. If it wouldn’t be art, I wouldn’t have spent so much money. I would have put the money in my pocket. In gold, in diamonds. ‘Carrousel Story’—it’s talking about an art!”

The conversation moved on to forklift trucks and customs expediters; Staub ate a sandwich and paid little attention. At one point, he recommended cryotherapy, whose practitioners endure the opposite of a sauna. “Minus one hundred and sixty degrees Celsius, for three minutes,” he said, and kissed his fingers. “I do it twice a week! It’s fantastic.”

Walking back to the ferry, he reminisced about being a young man in Saint-Tropez during the nineteen-seventies: “You know, without AIDS, just free, and everything more slow than today.” To make his point, he was barely moving forward. “And I think a lot of people, when they think of carrousels, think, Please, Mama, take me back to your breasts—I’m not sure I like this world.” ♦

ANNALS OF MEDICINE
The Lyme Wars

The Lyme-disease infection rate is growing. So is the battle over how to treat it.

by Michael Specter

Kaleigh Ahern was twelve years old when a tick bit her. She noticed it “perched” on her shoulder when she was taking a shower one morning. “I thought it was your average, everyday bug,” Ahern told me recently. But, when she tried to brush it off, the tick wouldn’t budge. “The legs wiggled but it was embedded in my skin. I freaked out and started screaming.” Kaleigh’s mother, Holly Ahern, came running and removed it. “I took the kid and the tick to the doctor,” she said. “I told him, Here is my kid, here is the tick, and there is the place where it was attached to her.” That was in 2002. The Aherns live near Saratoga Springs, New York, where Lyme disease has been endemic for years. The infection is transmitted by tick bites, so Ahern assumed that the doctor would prescribe a prophylactic dose of antibiotics. But he said that he wasn’t going to treat it. “If a rash develops or she starts to have flulike symptoms, bring her back,” he told her. At the time, Ahern, an associate professor of microbiology at SUNY Adirondack, didn’t know much about tick-borne illnesses. She took Kaleigh home and watched for the signature symptom of Lyme disease: a rash that begins with a bright-red bull’s-eye around the tick bite.

No rash developed, and Kaleigh was fine—strong enough to become an all-American swimmer both in high school and at Union College. There were times during high school when she felt mentally hazy and not quite right physically, which she attributed to allergies or a teen-age bout of mononucleosis. But at the end of her freshman year in college she found herself crippled by anxiety, depression, and insomnia. She was beset by searing headaches, her muscles often felt as though they were on fire, and her brain seemed wrapped in a dense fog. Kaleigh tested positive for Lyme disease. Like most physicians, her doctor followed the standard medical practice, endorsed by public-health officials throughout the United States, and prescribed a three-week course of antibiotics. “I was so happy to know what was wrong with me,” Kaleigh said. “For a while, I didn’t mind the pain.”

The drugs didn’t work, though. At her mother’s insistence, the doctor extended the prescription three more weeks, but Kaleigh only got sicker. This brought the Aherns to a clinical impasse. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established highly specific criteria for the diagnosis of Lyme disease: an acknowledged tick bite, the appearance of a bull’s-eye rash, and, for those who don’t live in a region where Lyme is common, laboratory evidence of infection. Most people who fit the profile respond well to antibiotics, even months or years after the initial infection. Many Lyme specialists, however, believe that short-term antibiotic therapy may suppress symptoms but rarely cures the disease. Kaleigh switched doctors and began a course of antibiotics that lasted eight more months.

There was no change. Furthermore, there is no evidence that prolonged antibiotic therapy helps patients with Lyme disease, so insurance companies almost never pay for it. “I realized that my parents were shovelling thousands of dollars into these antibiotics,” she said. “After the oral approach failed, I was recommended to go onto I.V. treatment, but I had had enough.” Kaleigh’s condition had become so grave that she withdrew from school. “I would have episodes where I would just lie on the ground writhing. And my parents could do nothing but watch. I wish they had taken videos and put them online, so people would know.”

Kaleigh turned to alternative treatments often recommended by Lyme patients with similar experiences. She took herbs—turmeric and ginger, which are thought by some to strengthen the immune system—and she gave up gluten, grains, refined foods, and sugar. The goal was to reduce inflammation caused by her body’s production of insulin and to inhibit the growth of the bacterium that causes Lyme. She also began treatments with a Rife machine, an electromagnetic device invented in the nineteen-twenties which emits radio signals that, some researchers suggest, can destroy harmful bacteria. Although thousands of people are convinced that Rife therapy has helped them with Lyme and other diseases, little empirical evidence exists to demonstrate that it works. Nonetheless, Kaleigh began to feel better. She still has headaches and severe muscular pain at times, but she returned to Union a year ago and graduated this spring. She knows that her approach to Lyme disease is controversial and acknowledges that the improvements might be due to her dietary regimen or to Rife treatments or to a placebo effect. She doesn’t mind; after enduring such pain, she has found that fine points don’t matter.

Lyme disease is the most commonly reported tick-borne illness in the United States, and the incidence is growing rapidly. In 2009, the C.D.C. reported thirty-eight thousand cases, three times more than in 1991. Most researchers agree that the true number of infections is five to ten times higher. Although some of that increase is due to heightened awareness, transmission is rising in areas, like New England, where the disease is well established, and is spreading to regions as far south as Florida, through changes in climate and the movements of infected animals.

The disease is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. In the Northeast and the Midwest, B. burgdorferi is transmitted by the bite of a black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis. (In the Western United States, a related tick, Ixodes pacificus, prevails, and in Europe the main vector is Ixodes ricinus.) Lyme was all but unknown until 1977, when Allen Steere, a rheumatologist at Yale, produced the first definitive account of the infection. The condition was initially thought to have been an outbreak of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in and around Lyme, Connecticut. In 1982, Willy Burgdorfer, a medical entomologist at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories, determined that the infection was caused by the previously unknown spirochete borrelia. As is common in scientific practice, the bacterium was named for him: Borrelia burgdorferi.

Those facts are undisputed. But nearly everything else about Lyme disease—the symptoms, the diagnosis, the prevalence, the behavior of the borrelia spirochete after it infects the body, and the correct approach to treatment—is contested bitterly and publicly. Even the definition of Lyme disease, and the terminology used to describe it, has fuelled years of acrimonious debate. The conventional medical assessment is straightforward: in most cases, the tick bite causes a skin rash, called erythema migrans, which is easily identified by its bull’s-eye. If left untreated, the bacteria can spread to muscles, joints, the heart, and even the brain. Public-health officials say that a few weeks of antibiotic treatment will almost always wipe out the infection, and that relapses are rare. In this view, put forth in guidelines issued by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Lyme is normally easy to treat and easy to cure.

For many people, though, the clinical situation is far more complicated. Some who have been infected with borrelia don’t notice the rash. Others—up to a quarter of those with Lyme, including Kaleigh Ahern—never even get one. Most troubling, some patients who are treated continue to suffer from a variety of symptoms long after their therapy has ended. Nobody really knows why they fail to get better. Infectious-disease experts refer to the phenomenon, which can affect up to twenty per cent of patients, as Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome. Researchers have attempted to resolve the mystery in experiments with monkeys, mice, and dogs; human studies are also under way. As the number of infections grows, so does the number of people struggling to figure out what is wrong with them.

Many of these patients say that medical officials pay little attention to their persisting symptoms, and that Lyme disease is anything but easy to treat or to cure. They believe that the bacteria can hide in the body for years, potentially causing harm long after treatment ends. This condition, they say, is pernicious, difficult to diagnose, rarely cured, and widely ignored. Moreover, at least four pathogens, in addition to the Lyme bacterium, can be transmitted by the black-legged tick: Anaplasma phagocytophilium, which causes anaplasmosis; Babesia microti, which causes babesiosis; Borrelia miyamotoi, a recently discovered genetic relative of the Lyme spirochete; and Powassan virus. Some of these infections are more dangerous than Lyme, and more than one can infect a person at the same time. Simultaneous infection, scientists suggest, may well enhance the strength of the assault on the immune system, while making the disease itself harder to treat or recognize.

“I am not sure why we act as if we know the answers,” Brian Fallon told me. Fallon, a psychiatrist who has studied the neurological impact of Lyme for years, is the director of the Lyme and Tick-Borne Diseases Research Center, at Columbia University. “The evidence that something more complex is going on is tantalizing and substantial.”

Fallon is right, yet the medical issues have largely been eclipsed by the attention generated by another faction in the Lyme wars. These people—patients, advocates, politicians, and “Lyme literate” physicians, led by the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society—refer to the illness as “chronic Lyme,” and argue that the traditional approach to diagnosis and treatment, put forth by most American physicians, all but guarantees failure. The Lyme Action Network, one of many political groups that have formed to increase awareness and raise funds, recently released a pamphlet called “It Might Be Lyme.” The group lists dozens of possible symptoms, including headache, joint pain, neck stiffness, chest pain, bladder dysfunction, hypersensitive skin, unexplained fevers, weight loss, sweats, chills, fatigue, blurry vision, heart murmurs, sleep disturbances (including too little or too much), difficulty with concentration, lightheadedness, and mood swings. Physicians associated with the network argue that a cure requires not weeks but months or years of strong antibiotics, and that relapses are common.

“There are two standards of care when it comes to Lyme,” Holly Ahern said. “One in which patients are diagnosed and treated until they get better, and the other where people are treated for three weeks with antibiotics—and, if you don’t get better, then there must be something else wrong with you, or perhaps you are making it up.” Ahern is a scientist, and hers is a measured critique. But emotion and despair are often the driving forces behind Lyme activism. The documentary “Under Our Skin: The Untold Story of Lyme Disease” essentially accused organized medicine of ignoring the illness. Scores of highly read blogs—Lyme Policy Wonk, Touched by Lyme, Living the Lyme Life—regularly overflow with fury.

Nobody disagrees that more research into the long-term effects of Lyme is needed. But most doctors reject the term “chronic Lyme,” in part because many people who say they have it are not infected with borrelia. Without biological proof—a positive blood test or the telltale skin rash—the symptoms are vague and varied and could apply to many conditions. Infectious-disease experts say that the lingering symptoms might be an autoimmune response to the original illness or residual damage to tissues caused by the infection. “There is no doubt that people can have symptoms after being treated for Lyme disease,” Roy Gulick told me when I visited him recently in his office at the Weill Cornell Medical College, where he is a professor of medicine and the chief of infectious diseases. “They can hang on for weeks or months. But you have to be specific about whether it’s plausibly related to Lyme.

“I am sympathetic to people who are suffering,” he continued. “And I have no doubt that they are. But if you have not been infected with borrelia you can’t have Lyme disease. We don’t have all the answers. We never do. These people are true believers. But I’m an infectious-disease doctor. I understand pathogens that cause disease and I understand the manifestations of those infections. Believing or not believing is not part of the process.”

I grew up in Connecticut, attended college in the Hudson Valley, and graduated in 1977, the year Lyme was first identified. I don’t recall hearing about the disease. I do remember going to a professor’s house for dinner one night that year and having him urge me to arrive before dusk, so that we might look for deer. We drove around for an hour without luck, and I wondered whether to believe him when he said he had seen one just the day before.

Today, deer are no longer exotic in the Hudson Valley, and the area has the highest rate of Lyme disease in the country. If you drive the back roads of Columbia County at dusk, deer are nearly impossible to avoid, and accidents are common. Ticks are constantly on residents’ minds, and watching children run barefoot to the edge of the bucolic woods is no longer a carefree delight. Deer are not Ixodes’s most important host, but they have come to symbolize the spread of Lyme, and represent an ecology that has changed dramatically in the past thirty-five years. “Once you have Lyme disease in the area, and once you start to carve up the forest into little bits, and especially when the fragmentation is done by suburban development, you get an increase in Lyme risk,” Richard Ostfeld told me recently when I met with him at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, in Millbrook, New York. Ostfeld, a senior scientist there, has studied Ixodes for more than a decade. “The best host for the tick and pathogens is not deer but white-footed mice,” he said. “And they do beautifully when you chop the forest into bits. They thrive. And competitors do not.”

Ixodes scapularis is surprisingly sophisticated for an organism that, until it is engorged with blood, is less than half the size of a pea. “These ticks are nimble, durable, and adaptable,” Ostfeld said. The black-legged tick passes through three distinct phases—larva, nymph, and adult—and females require a blood meal at each stage. They usually pick up the spirochete, which under the microscope looks like a spiral French fry, in their first meal, and pass the disease to the host—small mammals, birds, deer, and sometimes humans—during the second or the third. To insure that it becomes engorged, the tick can attach its barbed mouth to a host for up to a week. First, though, the tick releases a series of anti-inflammatory chemicals and antihistamines to numb the skin and make a bite difficult to notice. It then secretes a compound called cementum, a kind of glue that helps the tick adhere to its prey. With those tasks accomplished, the tick bores its mouthparts into its host. While it feeds, the tick can inject borrelia, and other pathogens, into the bloodstream.

Ostfeld is a thoughtful, soft-spoken man, not unduly excitable. But when he talks about the Lyme bacterium he sounds like a proud parent. “Borrelia is a remarkable creature,” he told me. “It has all my respect.” He went on to explain that the bacterium, after slipping through the tick’s mouthparts, can change its form, cloaking itself in the surface proteins of the tick’s saliva. Then, much like H.I.V., the bacterium hijacks the immune system. “It doesn’t stay in the bloodstream for long,” he said. “Instead, borrelia manages to insinuate itself into parts of the body that have fewer circulating antibodies, where it is harder for antibiotics to reach.”

The relationship between the tick and borrelia can be compared to the deadly, symbiotic partnership of Plasmodium falciparum parasites and the anopheles mosquitoes that transmit malaria, which have evolved together for thousands of years. Genetically, the bacteria are so adaptable that it is possible to find different strains of borrelia in the same tick. “Some of these infections are really very worrying,” Ostfeld said, as we sat, one sunny morning, in his green, airy office at the institute. “We can’t even know yet how big a problem a bacterium like miyamotoi will become. But it is possible that Lyme will turn out to be among the least threatening of the pathogens carried by Ixodes.”

Ostfeld, a field biologist, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and studies the ecology of small mammals—skunks, possums, chipmunks, and white-footed mice—which are found in large numbers in the Hudson Valley. Soon after he arrived at the institute, in 1990, he noticed something striking about the thousands of mice he had trapped: their ears were often covered in ticks the size of poppy seeds. Those ticks, Ixodes nymphs and larvae, were feeding on the mice. “That was the beginning of my interest in Lyme disease,” he said. His 2010 book, “Lyme Disease: The Ecology of a Complex System,” describes the environmental relationship in detail. Before European colonists arrived in America, ninety per cent of New England and New York was covered in forest. Lyme was unknown. In the next century, forested areas were cut by half. “But it was a shitty life here,” Ostfeld said. “Colonists had a rough go of it. The rocky soil was infertile and difficult for agriculture.” In the eighteen-thirties, when the Erie Canal opened the Ohio Valley to agricultural development, the farms of the Northeast were abandoned. The forests returned, along with deer. Mice and other small mammals accompanied them.

Diagnostic failures cause much of the confusion associated with Lyme disease. It takes the tick at least thirty-six hours to transmit borrelia. If ticks are removed immediately, the threat of infection falls dramatically. But it takes weeks, and sometimes longer, for blood tests to detect antibodies; a test taken too soon will produce negative results. Even then, many people who become infected will test negative in error, while others who aren’t infected will test positive.

“You get people all the time who have Lyme but who do not know it,” Ostfeld said. “Their doctors don’t know it.” The basic blood tests look for antibodies but are not always sensitive enough to pick out the right ones. Another test for Lyme disease involves PCR, a technique that allows scientists to amplify the number of copies of a specific region of DNA. When done properly, that test can detect the Lyme spirochete directly. Yet it is prone to contamination, and it often produces positive results for people who are not infected. The situation is similar to one in India, where tens of millions of people test positive for tuberculosis. Few of them will actually get sick, but many are mistakenly treated with highly toxic drugs. A relatively new, but expensive, diagnostic machine can differentiate between latent and active t.b. infections. “We badly need that kind of diagnostic certainty with Lyme,” Ostfeld told me. “And we do not have it.”

Public-health officials stress that if doctors see a bull’s-eye rash they should assume that the patient has Lyme and prescribe antibiotics. The advice is often ignored. Nor do many doctors or patients consider the potential impact of simultaneous infection with several pathogens. “This is not resolved science,” Ostfeld said. “Clearly, not everyone claiming to have Lyme disease is sick, particularly those who have never tested positive for borrelia. But there are just too many questions we still have to answer about those who are infected: Does the bacterium persist after treatment? If so, is it capable of harm? What is the impact of co-infections, and what is really the best way to treat advanced stages of Lyme?

“The conventional view is that several studies have answered the most important questions about persistence and treatment,” Ostfeld went on. “But look at heart disease. How many thousands of studies were conducted on the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease? Over how many decades? And we still go back and forth. When it comes to Lyme, we have a long way to go.”

The controversy over Lyme disease is unlikely to diminish until scientists resolve at least two critical, but related, questions. Can the bacteria persist in the body, causing harm and illness months or even years after treatment has ended? And can prolonged antibiotic therapy destroy the remaining bacteria? Here, as with nearly every issue related to Lyme and its treatment, there is disagreement not only about the answers but also about the questions.

Determining whether Lyme spirochetes cause illness after treatment is difficult in part because the symptoms are so diverse. Moreover, it is nearly impossible, with current tests, to know whether the infection has been cured. Recent studies with mice and macaques provide interesting clues. In a study published last year in the online journal Plos One, a team of scientists led by Monica E. Embers, of the Tulane National Primate Research Center, and Stephen W. Barthold, the director of the Center of Comparative Medicine at the University of California at Davis, carried out two experiments on rhesus macaques to determine whether borrelia persists after antibiotic treatments.

First, twenty-four rhesus macaques were infected with the Lyme bacteria in the laboratory. After four to six months, half the macaques received aggressive antibiotic therapy, which, in theory, should have cured them, but the bacteria persisted in some of the animals. Then the scientists used a method called xenodiagnosis to determine if treatment worked in three other monkeys. They planted ticks that had been reared in the lab under sterile conditions on macaques that had received antibiotics, and let them feed for four days. When the ticks were removed and examined, the scientists found small numbers of intact, functioning spirochetes in two of them, which could have come only from the blood of the macaques. A team of scientists led by Adriana Marques, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Linden Hu, of Tufts University School of Medicine, is conducting a similar study in humans. (The scientists have obtained permission from patients to permit ticks to feed on them.)

Other research, by Brian Fallon, the Columbia psychiatrist, found metabolic abnormalities in the brains of patients with confirmed cases of Lyme disease and chronic, post-treatment symptoms, when compared with the brains of healthy control subjects. That, too, suggests the bacterium continues to have an impact. None of these studies provide conclusive evidence, but together they strongly suggest that the infection can survive treatment in a primate. This finding raises the possibility that the bacteria could continue to cause illness long after a patient is supposedly cured. Similar research in mice, published last year in the Journal of Clinical Investigation by a team from Yale Medical School, found that while antibiotics stopped the infection, spirochete antigens persisted in areas adjacent to cartilage—a condition that could produce swelling.

None of these studies have swayed Gary Wormser, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at New York Medical College, and the lead author of the often criticized Infectious Diseases Society of America guidelines for Lyme. He says that, in the absence of new data, doctors should continue to treat Lyme with courses of oral antibiotics that generally take no more than thirty days.

“Right now, in the published literature, there is no evidence of persistence in humans, and if there were I would say, ‘So what?’ ” he told me recently. “You would have to show me that the spirochetes continue to produce disease and you would have to show me that they would respond to antibiotics.” Like most established scientists, Wormser maintains that one can rely only on the best current science-based evidence to practice medicine; otherwise, he may as well rely on voodoo. Furthermore, he stressed that it is dangerous to diagnose a disease based on symptoms alone. “There is a group of people with aches and pains and medically unexplained symptoms that are being treated for chronic Lyme.” He said these patients often go “from doctor to doctor” without a satisfactory diagnosis. “They are suffering and unhappy, and finally they go to a doctor who says, ‘I know what you have, it’s chronic Lyme.’ Then they get treated and treated and treated for chronic Lyme. And patients are happy because somebody has finally taken interest in them.”

Wormser continued, “If you had Lyme and nobody disputes it and you don’t feel back to normal, it’s logical to ask, ‘Does the antibiotic work?’ Or maybe the organism is still there. Those questions have been explored, and we continue to explore them.” Yet he added that the majority of people who are being treated as if they had post-Lyme symptoms have never had the disease. “Never had the test, the rash, swelling, not the slightest credible evidence of Lyme. If somebody walked into your office and said, ‘I have renal failure, I need dialysis,’ you would do a test. If it was negative, nobody in his right mind would give the patient dialysis.”

Wormser’s many critics regard his view of the disease as willfully limited. In response, he and others cite four double-blind, placebo-controlled trials funded by the N.I.H. over the past fifteen years. Each attempted to determine whether prolonged antibiotic treatment, given after the initial courses were completed, helps eliminate persistent symptoms of Lyme disease. The two largest studies reported no evidence of improvement; the results of the other two studies were equivocal. But none of the researchers concluded that the theoretical benefits outweighed the tangible risks of extended intravenous therapy, which included severe infections. In a separate case, a woman on intravenous antibiotics died after a blood clot.

Physicians who regularly see people with Lyme symptoms say that the conventional methods simply don’t work. “I think a lot of these people who are set in their ways need to see more patients,” Richard Horowitz told me when I called him at his office in Hyde Park, New York. Horowitz is one of the most prominent “Lyme literate” physicians: he is board certified in internal medicine and has practiced in the Hudson Valley for more than twenty-five years. Officials who endorse the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s approach to Lyme disease consider Horowitz a pariah, but patients wait for months to see him, and several told me that he had essentially cured them of a disease that nobody else seemed able to treat.

Horowitz told me that he has seen more than twelve thousand patients, all of whom have a tick-borne ailment. Whenever possible, he avoids antibiotics. “Most of my patients do not present simply with Lyme,” he told me. “They almost always have multiple co-infections. That means they have a suppressed immune system with complex symptomology. Thirty days of doxycycline”—the most common drug used to treat Lyme—“just isn’t going to cure this. Each of these pathogens requires different regimens.”

Horowitz offers a complex combination of dietary restrictions and supplements to help “detoxify” the body and starve the bacteria. He argues that organized medicine, by relying on a few double-blind trials, focusses only on borrelia and Lyme. “But we know the ticks can spread many pathogens. More than half of my patients present with babesiosis,” he told me. (It causes symptoms similar to those of Lyme, though it more frequently begins with fevers and chills.) The incidence of babesiosis, which is caused by microscopic parasites that infect red blood cells, has been increasing dramatically in the Hudson Valley, according to research done by Wormser. “That infection has to be treated in an entirely different way from Lyme, and together they cause far more harm than either one does alone,” Horowitz said. “I have never understood why that is a controversial assertion.”

David Roth is not a scientist, but he believes that only science can end the Lyme wars. I met with him one gray, cloudy day on the forty-third floor of the Blackstone Investment Group building in Manhattan, where he is a managing director. Roth was dressed in pinstripes, a crisp white shirt, a yellow tie, and spit-shined brogues. He has an air of distinguished nonchalance, and his brown hair is tousled in the manner of a Kennedy. Three years ago, Roth became very sick, and while it has been difficult for him, and for his family, his illness may be the best thing that has happened for people infected with tick-borne ailments.

“I started working on this problem because I was shocked by the approach of the medical community,” he told me. “I felt there was a real social injustice.” Roth’s story was similar to those of others I had heard. His illness began with flulike symptoms, enlarged lymph nodes, and insomnia. Doctors found no apparent cause. His symptoms worsened; full-body shakes, numbness in his feet and hands, pain in his tendons, and immense fatigue. “I went up and down this city seeing doctors,” he said. “I had CAT scans and PET scans and M.R.I.s.” Those tests also turned up nothing, but eventually—about four months after falling ill—he tested positive for both Lyme disease and babesiosis. He was treated with antibiotics as well as with malaria medication; they helped, but only for a while. “When I stopped, things got worse,” he told me.

The more he looked into the treatment of Lyme, the angrier he became. “Here is what I don’t understand,” he said. “Somebody can get ill and not know what it is and the symptoms get worse and worse. Two years or more later, they can learn that they have Lyme. They take antibiotics for a month. And then, according to their doctors and insurance companies, they are done. Cured. Sometimes that is enough. But many people continue to be sick, and the government’s position, in a world where there are ten times as many bacterial cells as human cells in our body, is that this particular bacteria has been removed forever and the problem must be due to something else.”

Roth is forty-six, goes to the gym several times a week, and looks robust. (“One of the problems with Lyme is that people tend to look better than they are,” he said.) He has received treatment—dietary supplements and dietary changes—from Horowitz, and his health has improved greatly. Like Kaleigh Ahern, he has difficult days, but they are less frequent. Recently, he was appointed to a federal advisory committee that is working on ways to improve Lyme diagnostics. He was one of the hosts of a gala, held by the Tick-Borne Disease Alliance, earlier this year, which raised eight hundred thousand dollars. “I try to act rationally and work with rational people,” he went on. “Sometimes that is hard to do.”

For Lyme activists to be taken seriously, they will have to be led more by people like Roth than by those who foster dark conspiracies. I was told by several Lyme activists that the government created the infection on Plum Island, that reporters at the Times have been “muzzled” and prevented from reporting honestly about Lyme, and that the N.I.H. has made a pact with pharmaceutical companies to ignore chronic Lyme. There is now a bill before the legislature in New York that would require insurance companies to reimburse long-term treatment with antibiotics—even though no study has proved their effectiveness, and treatment with I.V. antibiotics can cause serious, and sometimes fatal, complications.

Meanwhile, the scientists sometimes seem to respond more comfortably to data than to people. Researchers at the N.I.H. are pursing several lines of inquiry, including the possibility of bacterial persistence. The atmosphere resembles that of the early days of AIDS activism, when many of the individuals most at risk lost confidence in their doctors and sought their own medical answers. In the end, organizers of ACTUP and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis became well known for their public protests, but they succeeded for another reason: they did their homework. Nobody was more knowledgeable about the course of H.I.V. infection than the best-informed activists.

Lyme-advocacy organizations need to rely on similarly well-informed people. Kaleigh Ahern is one of them. She recently presented a paper on the behavior of black-legged ticks at the annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. “It was my thesis at Union,” she explained. “I looked at the effects of soil pH on molting success. I wanted to know the ecological factors that make Lyme increase so steadily in this region.” She has applied to graduate school, where she hopes to help develop more useful diagnostics for Lyme.

I asked if her parents were surprised that she has chosen to work with Lyme ticks. “They are horrified,” she told me, laughing. “But, if I don’t do it, who will? ” ♦

THE SPORTING SCENE
The Orange Trapper

Compulsions are hard to explain.

by John McPhee

Fishing from a canoe in the Delaware River, I like to ship the paddle and let the boat go where it will. I watch the stony bottom, which flies by under fast-moving water. This is not Philadelphia. This is two hundred river miles above Philadelphia, where the stream-rounded rocks are so clear they look printed. Shoving the rocks, anadromous lampreys have built fortress nests, which are spread around the river like craters of the moon. Mesmerized, I watch the rocks go by. Fly-casting for bass, I see golf balls.

From shallows in the Merrimack in Manchester, New Hampshire, I once picked up a ball that bore the logo of a country club two and a half miles upstream. If the river brought it there, the ball had come through deep water and then over the Amoskeag Dam. In the Connecticut River above Northampton, Massachusetts, I’ve seen golf balls by the constellation—too deep to reach and too far from any upstream golf course for their presence to make sense unless people hit them off their lawns. Compulsions are easy to come by and hard to explain. Mine include watching for golf balls, which I do with acute attention, the fact notwithstanding that I quit golf cold when I was twenty-four. These days, my principal form of exercise is on a bicycle, which I ride a good bit upward of two thousand miles a year. I go past golf courses. How could I not? I live in New Jersey, which has a golf-course density of five per hundred square miles, or twice the G.C.D. of Florida, which has more golf courses than any other state. Moreover, the vast undeveloped forests of the southern part of New Jersey tend to shove the densities toward and beyond Princeton, in whose environs I ride my bike. The woods that lie between public roads and private fairways remind me of the dry terrain between a river levee and the river itself. In Louisiana along the Mississippi this isolated and often wooded space is known as the river batture. If you’re in Louisiana, you pronounce it “batcher.” From my bicycle in New Jersey, if I am passing a golf-links batture, my head is turned that way and my gaze runs through the woods until a white dot stops it, which is not an infrequent occurrence. I get off my bike and collect the ball.

The Delaware is less accommodating. When you are flying along on fast current, you don’t just get off your canoe and prop it up on a kickstand in order to pick up a golf ball. Over time, seeing so many golf balls in the river was such a threatening frustration that I had to do something about it. Research led to the telephone number of a company then in Michigan. A real person answered and was even more than real. She understood me. She knew what I was asking and did not call 911. Instead, she had questions of her own: What was the speed of the current? What was the depth of the river? Was the bottom freestone? Sand? Clay? Silt? After completing the interview, she said, “You want the Orange Trapper.”

“The Orange Trapper?”

“The Orange Trapper.”

It came in various lengths. I said I thought the nine-footer would do. The nine might be stiffer in the current than the twelve, the fifteen, the eighteen, the twenty-one, or the twenty-four. Besides, nine (actually, 9.6) just felt right. It was the length of my fly rods.

What came in the mail was only twenty-one inches long, with an orange head, a black grip, and a shaft that consisted of ten concentric stainless tubes with a maximum diameter of five-eighths of an inch. You could conduct an orchestra with it. It was beautiful. The orange head was a band of industrial-strength plastic, as obovate as a pear and slightly wider than a golf ball. A depression in its inside top was there to secure one side of a ball, but the genius of the device was in a working part, a bevelled “flipper” that came up through the throat and would waggle into place on the other side of the ball. The Orange Trapper worked two ways. It had no upside or downside. You could surround a golf ball with either side, then lift it up as if you were playing lacrosse with no strings. You could turn the head over—a hundred and eighty degrees—and the ball would generally stay put. But flip the thing over once more and the ball would always roll free. Made by JTD Enterprises, it could have been designed by Apple.

Even so, finesse was required to trap a ball in shallow current. After seeing one, and swinging around, and going hard upstream, and shipping the paddle, you had about five seconds to place the head of the Trapper over the ball. I missed as often as not. It wasn’t the Trapper’s fault. My average would have been higher chasing hummingbirds with a butterfly net. The river is an almost endless sequence of shallows, riffles, rapids, and slow pools. For the real action, I went below some white water into a long deep pool with Don Schlaefer in his johnboat. Don is a fishing pal. He plays golf. He had no interest in the balls in the river, but he could put his boat right over them and hold it there while I fished with the Orange Trapper. I picked up a dozen golf balls in half an hour.

Marvelling at the craziness, Don said, “Why are you doing this? They’re only golf balls. Golf balls are cheap.”

I said, “Money has nothing to do with it.”

A Titleist Pro V1, currently the Prada golf ball, costs four or five dollars on the Internet and more in a pro shop. If a person of Scottish blood says money has nothing to do with that, he is really around the corner. True, I don’t find balls of such quality often in the river. But they’re a high percentage of what I pick up in the roadside woods of New Jersey. Titleist makes about a million balls a day. In the United States, for all qualities and brands, a present estimate is that golfers lose three hundred million golf balls a year.

Why? Ask George Hackl, who grew up playing golf on courses around Princeton, now lives in central New Hampshire, and is a member of Bald Peak, Yeamans Hall, Pine Valley, and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.

Hackl: “It is an indication of the vast disparity of wealth in this country that golfers in some places can hit seven-dollar balls into woods and thickets and not even bother to look for them.”

There is less to it than that. Golfers have egos in the surgeon range. They hit a drive, miss the fairway, and go looking for the ball thirty yards past where it landed. When their next drive goes into timber and sounds like a woodpecker in the trees, there is no way to know the vector of the carom, so they drop another ball and play on. It must be said, in their defense, that various pressures concatenate and force them to keep moving, no matter the cost in golf balls. The foursome behind is impatient. A major issue is how long it takes to play. It is infra dig to cause “undue delay.” In the Rules of Golf, there’s a five-minute time limit on looking for lost balls. The rule may be unknown to some golfers and by others ignored, but five minutes or less is what most golfers give to finding lost balls. The rest are mine.

You get off your bike, pick up a ball, and sometimes are able to identify the species it hit. Pine pitch makes a clear impression. Tulip poplars tend to smear. An oak or hickory leaves a signature writ small and simple. A maple does not leave maple syrup. At your kitchen sink, you can tell how long a ball sat on the ground by the length of time required to take the ground off the ball.

With felt-tip pens and indelible ink, golfers decorate balls to individualize them beyond the markings of the manufacturer. If more than one player is using a Callaway 3 HX HOT BITE or a Pinnacle 4 GOLD FX LONG—or, far more commonly, there’s a coincidence of Titleists—you need your own pine tree. Some golfers’ graffiti are so elaborate that they resemble spiderwebs festooned with Christmas ornaments. Golfers also draw straight, longitudinal lines that serve as gunsights in putting. It is possible to mark a ball with a ballpoint pen, but some golfers actually believe that the weight of ballpoint ink, altering the pattern of flight, will affect the precision of their shots. It is tempting to say that the prevalence of this belief is in direct proportion to handicap.

In the frenzy of marketing, golf balls are sold in such complex variety that golf’s pro shops are not far behind fishing’s fly shops, where line weights and rod weights and tip flex and reel seats are sold in so many forms for so many different capabilities and so many different situations that people’s basements are forested with tackle. And, as with fishing equipment, the spectrum of subtlety in golf balls includes price. The difference is not among manufacturers but within the product lines of manufacturers. You can buy a dozen Titleist DT SoLos for less than twenty dollars. I know a golfer who has spoken as follows about looking for a wayward ball: “If you don’t find yours but find another of the same quality, you’re even. If you find a ball that’s not up to your standards, you leave it there for a lower class of golfer.” How he happened to get into the woods in the first place was not a topic he addressed. He reminded me of a pirate in the Guayas River near Guayaquil. With six other pirates, he came off a needle boat and over the stern of a Lykes Brothers merchant ship. They were armed mainly with knives. One of them held a hacksaw blade at a sailor’s throat while others tied him to a king post. A pirate pointed at the sailor’s watch, and said, “Give me.” The sailor handed over the watch. The pirate looked at it and gave it back.

There’s more to decode on a lost ball than someone’s subjective hieroglyph. One Easter Sunday in Princeton, I picked up a Titleist Pro V1x that was so far off the nearest fairway it was almost in the street. On one side of the ball, a logo in very small red block letters said “CORNELL UNIVERSITY.” I went home and looked up the schedule of the Princeton golf team. On Good Friday and Black Saturday, fourteen schools had competed in the Princeton Invitational Tournament. As that ball suggested, the order of finish was 1 Rutgers, 2 Yale, 3 Penn, 4 Columbia, 5 St. Bonaventure, 6 St. John’s, 7 Princeton, 8 Harvard, 9 Towson, 10 Connecticut and George Mason (tied), 12 St. Joseph’s, 13 Rider, and 14 Cornell.

The course, called Springdale, is on land owned by Princeton University and leased to a private club. It has been there since 1902, and in the heraldry on its lost balls you can see who plays there now.

Titleist 2 NXT Extreme Ivy Funds

Titleist 2 Pro V1 392 CHUBB

Titleist 3 Pro V1 392 Morgan Stanley Funds

Titleist 4 DT 90 The Pasadena Group of Mutual Funds

Titleist 1 DT SoLo CREDIT SUISSE/FIRST BOSTON

Titleist 2 Bowne Financial

Titleist 3 Pro V1 392 STATE FARM

Titleist 4 AIG AMERICAN GENERAL

Titleist 3 NXT-Tour ASSURANT

Titleist 3 Pro V1x BOLI (Bank-Owned Life Insurance)

Titleist 4 Pro V1 MFS INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT

Top-Flite 1 XL 3000 Super Long MAXIMUM INVESTMENTS

Top-Flite 1 XL 2000 Extra Long New Jersey Lottery

That modest sample was gathered in a wooded batture on the slice side of one par-4 hole—off the course and out of bounds. Recently, I was on a ride with Griff Witte, of the Washington Post, who was in Princeton to teach a course in the same writing program I teach in, and we spotted eighteen essentially new golf balls in that same copse, all within ten feet of the curb. There is something Einsteinian about that patch of woods, as if the Institute for Advanced Study, which is across the street, is experimentally affecting the trajectories of tee shots and approach shots, bending light.

Of course, the golfers who play there are not all wealth manipulators.

Callaway 3 HX DIABLO TOUR New York City Physicians Golfing Association logo with the rod of Asclepius and two irons

Pinnacle 1 Extreme XOMED Surgical Products, green and blue

Titleist 2 VELOCITY Urologic Consultants

Nike 3 SUPER FAR with escutcheon of CHIEF, Burlington County Chiefs of Police Association

Titleist 4 Pro V1x 332 AJGA (American Junior Golf Association)

Nike 1 ONEGOLD IJGT (International Junior Golf Tour)

Titleist 4 EMERSON Climate Technologies

Titleist 1 384 DT 90 CALGON Carbon Corporation

two Titleists Stone & Webster engineering

three Nike DISTANCE, each with the logo of Golf Magazine (three editors, all errant? or one editor who hit three awful shots?)

And, whoever the golfers may be, they seem to be jet-set cosmopolitan.

Pinnacle 1 Power Core MAUNA LANI

Titleist 4 NXT MAUNA KEA

Titleist GSE, orange-and-green logo, HONG KONG

Medalist 1 Acushnet THE ROLLS OF MONMOUTH, the logo a human hand holding a scroll within a swirling green “R” that more or less resembles a golf swing. Internet: “The Rolls of Monmouth Golf Club, with its championship 6,733 yard golf course, is set in superb countryside with spectacular views of the Welsh hills. It is one of the most outstanding golf courses, not just in Wales, but in the whole of the UK.”

That is a far cry from what was lying around this course during the Second World War. I was a caddie here, spending a lot of time looking for balls hit away by lumber dealers and local doctors. Rubber had gone to war, and after Pearl Harbor golf balls manufactured before the war became ever more scarce with the passage of time. Hunting them was not just part of work and play; it was a treasure hunt, off the charts above Easter eggs and into fraternity with the Eustace diamonds. The pro and the greenkeeper colluded in collecting them and selling them to the golfers, so in combing the woods in one’s own interest there was adrenalizing stealth and insubordination. No potential threat was ever going to stop me if I came upon a golf ball lost and abandoned, and apparently nothing ever will.

There was something we called a war ball. It was made with a synthetic that shared few, if any, characteristics with latex. It shared many characteristics with granite gneiss. When you hit it hard and square, the nerve ends in your arms were outraged and the ball moved forward a short distance. My father used war balls. They didn’t cost him much, because he hit them straight, didn’t lose them, and would never have dreamed of throwing them away. He was a medical doctor but he wore kilts in variety shows when he impersonated Harry Lauder. Four years after the war ended, he was playing a Kro-Flite that may not have been a war ball but looked as if it had been through a war. I was thinking of that ball when I wrote a poem about him to accompany a present I was giving him for Christmas—precisely what present, I don’t remember, possibly a tee. The poem was more than thirty lines long and included these four:

He took up golf

And learned with tears,

And used one ball

For fifteen years.

On an August Wednesday in the late forties, he teed up that Kro-Flite and drove it down the twelfth at Springdale, a par 4 at 413 yards. I don’t know what club he used for his second shot—probably a brassie, as the longest-distance fairway wood was known then, because a couple of hundred yards was a mile by Kro-Flite. The ball took off, avoided the woodlot that bordered the twelfth on the right, sailed past a footbridge that crossed a stream, landed on the apron, rolled onto the green, and went straight into the hole. An eagle achieved that way is a more exalted feat than a par-3 hole-in-one. I am looking at that Kro-Flite as I write this. Beige with age, it sits on a tee set in cedar. Preserving that ball must have created great conflict in my father, whose middle name was Roemer but might as well have been Thrift.

The twentieth century was the age of the wound golf ball. An all but endless thin rubber band was wound around a solid core and wound around and around and around, until the growing sphere was large enough to be surrounded in turn by a vulcanized cover. Some manufacturers tried steel bearings as cores. Others advertised the aerodynamic mysteries of balls with liquid centers. How a rubber band can be wrapped around a liquid seems a fair question to ask. You freeze the liquid center and let it melt inside the finished ball. There was an even fairer question: What is the liquid in the liquid center? This kept whole law firms feverish in defense of intellectual property, no matter that the supersecret ingredients were water, salt, and corn syrup, even honey.

Covers were not as tough as they are now, not nearly as protective of the ball or the ego, and the ubiquitous signature of the bad golfer was a “smile,” where a ball had been cut into by a mis-hit iron. If you peeled back the cover with your penknife and then went on whittling into the rubber band, ends popped up like frizzy hair. If you whittled into a war ball, what you found inside was rock solid. Oddly, that is what golf balls look like today after you split them with a table saw. Core, mantle, crust—they are models of the very planet they are filling up at a rate worldwide approaching a billion a year.

The wound-ball era began in 1898 and ended in 2000, when Titleist introduced the Pro V1, with its solid core. This was no war ball. The synthetic polybutadiene, first polymerized in czarist Russia, had undergone a series of catalytic refinements—titanium to nickel to cobalt to neodymium—that had led to more durable flexibilities in tires and extra distance in golf balls. A generation of solid-core balls was introduced in the nineteen-seventies, but players didn’t use them. The balls travelled farther but were less controllable. It was a matter of spin, and relative softness. The Spalding Top-Flite felt so hard it was called Rock-Flite.

In the first three years of the twenty-first century, average driving distances on the PGA Tour went up thirteen yards. The distance was in the solid core but the control and comfort were bestowed by a new urethane cover that felt soft like a wound ball and gave players the spin they were looking for. In a display of contemporary golf balls sliced open hemispherically, we are back to geophysics. The TaylorMade Penta TP consists of five concentric spheres, like old Gaia herself—crust, upper mantle, asthenosphere, lower mantle, core. There are four-piece balls and three-piece balls, not to mention the core-and-cover two-piece ball. Country-club golfers are attracted to differences that, in bogey golf, make no difference. There is even a one-piece golf ball, on which the dimples are extremities of the core. Sporting-goods empires have not been built on the one-piece ball. Some golfers, carrying technology into their own kitchens, have thought that if you heat up a golf ball it goes farther. And there is some truth in the proposition. One guy heated up his ball in his microwave. As he took it out, it blew off two of his fingers.

Golf balls are so well made now that they are said to last five hundred years, although it is not clear who would know that. Environmentalists have expressed concern about the amount of zinc in lost golf balls and what will happen when it escapes, to which golfdom responds that there is less zinc in a million golf balls than in five bottles of mouthwash. Today, as during the Second World War, there is negotiability in used golf balls. Organized companies under contract to country clubs collect them and sell them to discount stores. At TPC Sawgrass, near Jacksonville, the seventeenth green spends a lot of time on television, because it is essentially an island, connected to the rest of the course by only a narrow causeway. Year in, year out, golfers, on average, hit two hundred and seventy-four golf balls a day into the water around that green.

I used to give the balls I found to my shad-and-pickerel-fishing companion George Hackl—Member Hackl of St. Andrews, et cetera, who long had a single-digit handicap. In New Hampshire, snowbound, he has a barnlike basement in which he putts, chips, and even drives golf balls. On the Internet, I once bought green yard goods patterned with white golf balls and colorful tees, and my wife, Yolanda Whitman, fashioned sleeves from it which would each hold a couple of dozen balls for presentation to Hackl. But Hackl is rich and does not merit such largesse—not in Yolanda’s opinion, anyway—and she brought down the hammer. No more sleeves. No more golf balls for Hackl. So I turned for help to The First Tee.

This is a national organization, headquartered in Florida, that has taught golf to seven million children, primarily in inner cities, since it was founded, in 1997. The nearest chapter to my home in Princeton is The First Tee of Greater Trenton, which operates even in winter, in the Y on Pennington Avenue. Not long ago, a similar program called Swing 2 Tee was set up by Pat Lindsay-Harvey and Carol Sinkler, using the “SNAG (Start New At Golf) equipment, instruction, and assessment system.” I give balls to them, too, usually six or seven dozen at a time, but there was one memorable day a couple of years ago when the number greatly exceeded that. I had informed Hackl that he had become golfer non grata, and suggested to him that he turn over to me some of the golf balls I had given him, and any others he could spare. On his next trip to New Jersey, he brought me two hundred and seven golf balls. On the same day, Bryce Chase—a liability lawyer, golfer, and lacrosse coach who is one of my routine biking companions—inventoried his garage and turned over to me eight hundred and thirteen balls. Not a few of them were still in their original cardboard cartons—brand new, but not Bryce’s brand. They are given to him by well-wishers who apparently don’t know that Bryce is like a pirate on a merchant ship spurning a sailor’s watch. Thanks to Bryce Chase and George Hackl, my single day’s haul for Swing 2 Tee and The First Tee of Greater Trenton was one thousand and twenty golf balls.

On one edge of Princeton, close to Province Line Road, is TPC Jasna Polana, a championship golf course designed by Gary Player. The clubhouse was once the zillion-dollar home of Seward Johnson, a Johnson & Johnson Johnson, whose young Polish widow, when it came to that, preferred southern Europe to western Princeton and effected the conversion of her estate—with its Flemish tapestries, its marble mantels, its bronze casements, its flying travertine staircase, its orchid house—to golf. Numerous memberships at Jasna Polana are corporate. Avis is a member. Citibank. Deutsche Bank. Barclays. BlackRock Funds. Brown Brothers Harriman. Bristol-Myers Squibb. Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

It happens that a hiking-and-birding trail, some of it paved, runs down a stream called Stony Brook, crosses the water on a footbridge, and continues beside Jasna Polana for two or three hundred yards before intersecting U.S. 206, the road to Trenton. This is not on one of my biking routes, but on solo rides I have been there, and returned there, inspired by curiosity and a longing for variety and, not least, the observation that in the thickets and copses and wild thorny roses on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence are golf balls—Big Bank golf balls, Big Pharma golf balls, C-level golf balls (C.E.O., C.O.O., C.F.O. golf balls), lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay. I couldn’t help noticing that the apertures among the chain links were slightly wider than two inches. This—no less than any lake, stream, or marsh—was a situation for the Orange Trapper.

Extended full length, it bends slightly from its own weight, and quivers, wandlike, which amplifies the degree of difficulty if you have inserted it through a chain-link fence and are trying to settle the orange head around a golf ball inside a bramble of wild rose. In Sherwood Forest, R. Hood had an easier time of it. You are holding the grip with one hand, against the fence, and the head is trying to settle on the ball, nine feet into Jasna Polana. On the third or fourth try, the lowering band surrounds the ball. You raise the head, the ball rolls free. You do it all again, and raise the head. The ball rolls free. You do it all again. The flipper clicks into place. The ball is rising through the roses. Inch by inch, you bring the nine feet back through the fence, ready to try again if the flipper fails. With nearly nine feet of shaft now bobbing behind you, the trapped ball has arrived at the chain link. You pull it through, inside its orange band, as if you had experience as an obstetrician. You flip the ball into your hand—a Pro V1x with the logo of ICBA Securities (Independent Community Bankers of America). You move a few feet up the fence and go after another ball.

I was working that fence near 206 one day, where Jasna Polana has a service gate. Preoccupied by the delicacy of Trapper placement, I was slow to notice a middle-aged, heavyset greenkeeper hurrying on foot toward the gate. He was past the age of running but he was chugging flat out, and this was no place for me. I withdrew the Orange Trapper, collapsed its telescoping shaft, put it into a saddlebag with the day’s harvest, jumped onto my bicycle, and headed back upstream, upwoods, and away from 206 at a speed so blazing that I probably could not duplicate it if I were to try to now, but that was years ago, when I was eighty. ♦

LETTER FROM TIMBUKTU
State of Terror

What happened when an Al Qaeda affiliate ruled in Mali.

by Jon Lee Anderson

On the spine of a hogback hill overlooking Bamako, the capital of the West African nation of Mali, is a green sliver of a park, decorated with effigies of Mali’s historic explorers. On a recent visit, I stopped one piercingly hot morning to admire a bronze bust of a turbaned, bearded man set on a plinth. The nameplate was missing, but, judging from the man’s wide brow and Arab features, it seemed likely that this was Ibn Battuta, the great Moroccan traveller, who journeyed through the Empire of Mali and visited its capital, near the River Niger, in 1352.

When Battuta arrived, the empire was at its zenith. Mali had converted to Islam, and Battuta, a Muslim, was impressed by the sight of boys bound in chains to force them to memorize the Koran. In his diaries, Battuta marvelled at the Niger’s crocodiles, so ferocious that a local man stood guard when he went to urinate on the riverbank. A few decades earlier, Mali’s emperor Mansa Mūsā had crossed the Sahara on a pilgrimage to Mecca, with a vast entourage carrying thousands of gold bars; in his zeal, he gave away so many of them that the value of gold in Cairo’s bazaar was depressed for years. The Emperor’s largesse established Mali’s reputation as a place of fabled bounty—a notion that never entirely vanished.

Yet Mali, the proud home of an ancient civilization, has never quite managed to maintain itself as a sovereign state. Slavery has dominated its history, with the lighter-skinned Arab-descended peoples of the north often in positions of control over the darker-skinned Africans of the south. (Battuta was offended by the sight of slave girls going naked in the capital.) Mali has also been attacked from outside: conquered, neglected, and then conquered again. A century after Battuta’s visit, the empire was invaded by the Songhay people, and not long after that the Songhay collapsed, too—their warriors, armed with spears and arrows, overwhelmed by invading Moroccans with muskets. Mali lapsed into obscurity for two hundred years; the ancient northern city of Timbuktu, once a flourishing outpost for the exchange of salt, slaves, minerals, and cultural knowledge, was reduced to a mustering point for camel caravans crossing the Sahara.

In the park, another statue depicted a European man, holding a sword and wearing a fastidiously buttoned uniform and a peaked kepi hat. There was no nameplate there, either, so I asked a group of teen-agers sitting in the shade of a nearby tree if they knew whom the statue represented. They looked blank. One of them said, “A Frenchman?”

It was a fair guess. To judge from appearances, it may have been General Louis-Léon-César Faidherbe, who oversaw France’s colonial expansion into Mali. The French regime lasted nearly eighty years, and ended only with the country’s independence, in 1960. It had complicated effects. The French outlawed slavery—after decades of taking slaves themselves—but they tolerated it in the north, where it still persists. And they created the outline of a state in Mali, but also conscripted tens of thousands of its men to fight in the First and Second World Wars. It seemed odd that Malians continued to pay tribute to their former conquerors. Do statues of King Leopold still stand in Kinshasa? Maybe Malians were more sanguine than other Africans about their colonial legacy. Or perhaps, after centuries of subjugation, Mali has got used to being defined by whoever comes to dictate the terms of its existence—usually by force.

Early last year, the latest wave of conquerors came. First were the Tuaregs, traditional nomads, slavers, and warriors who had been fighting for decades to win the north for themselves. Days later, they were joined by an international group of Islamist radicals. In three months of combat, they seized the entire north and declared an independent state, which they called Azawad, from a Tuareg word meaning “the land of pasture.” Before long, though, the occupiers began fighting among themselves for control. The Islamists won, and, as Azawad’s new rulers, they espoused fealty to Al Qaeda and decreed strict adherence to Sharia law. It was a unique victory in the history of contemporary extremism. For decades, Al Qaeda had acted as a largely rootless and amorphous agent of terror. Now its brash new affiliate had secured itself a state.

The rules were harsh. Music and television were banned, graven images were destroyed, and men and women were obliged to wear conservative dress. Transgressors were publicly punished with amputation, whipping, and stoning. Three hundred thousand people fled. For ten months, as the Islamists secured their hold, the world powers dithered, and the United States pointedly stayed on the sidelines. Many Malians believed that their best hope was France. But its new President, François Hollande, had behaved diffidently in foreign affairs—even in Africa, where France has intervened militarily dozens of times since 1960. “I’m adamant,” he said in October. “We will not put boots on the ground.”

Just before Christmas, the United Nations passed a resolution authorizing an African-led military force to be trained and sent to Mali—but the mission would take nine months to prepare. The Islamists were buoyed. On January 10th, a force of about eight hundred barrelled south, and swiftly overran the town of Konna, close to a strategic airbase and two days’ march from Bamako. Foreigners began to flee the capital, and embassy workers sent their children home. “There was real alarm,” an American diplomat in Mali told me.

France, finally spurred into action, launched a series of blistering air strikes, and began airlifting in troops. Along with soldiers from several neighboring countries, the French retook Mali’s northern towns in rapid succession. Except for one helicopter pilot, who was shot down on the first day of the campaign, there were no French casualties. In a few weeks the rebels had retreated.

In the end, Mali was rescued by the people who had occupied it for eight decades. But the insurgents were still in hiding, preparing to fight again. Worse, the essential cause of Mali’s problems—the racial divide, which effectively split the country—persisted, and, with it, the unresolved question of Mali’s identity. Was it one country or two? For rogue groups like Al Qaeda, broken states are appealing havens—and excellent bases from which to strike at the West. But what can hold a country together when centuries of occupation and bigotry have forced it apart?

A few weeks after the insurgents were chased out, Bamako, hundreds of miles to the south, showed few signs that the country had been at war. A state of emergency had been declared, and weddings and baptisms rescheduled for safe private places. But the schools had reopened, and the roads were crammed with cars and cheap Chinese motorbikes. In Bamako, the life styles of past centuries coexist with those of the present day. Amid the telecom ads and battered Peugeot taxis were horse carts carrying firewood. Outside the National Assembly, a line of redolent fetish stalls sold monkey skulls, desiccated parrots, and pots of lion fat. One featured skins of serval, a ferocious nocturnal wildcat, which had lent its name to the French military mission: Opération Serval.

Most people seemed consumed with everyday work. On the riverbank, women in bright print dresses tilled the soil, using every available square inch. Mali’s population is more than eighty per cent Muslim, and the fighting had not interrupted devotions. At one workshop, where a team was painting prayer-time boards, the owner smiled and said, “Everybody wants to pray nowadays. This war is good for business.”

Still, it was clear in Bamako that the war in the north was a symptom of Mali’s larger problems. When the Islamists began their attacks, it was widely interpreted as a sign that the government was weak. Soon afterward, an Army captain named Amadou Sanogo staged a coup in Bamako, deposing the President. Under pressure, he quickly stepped aside to allow the speaker of parliament to become the interim leader, but he retained the real power, controlling the ministries of defense and of the interior.

In early February, two rival groups of soldiers, on opposite sides of the coup, got into a firefight outside a garrison in Bamako. Two bystanders were killed and several children injured, just months after a previous clash that had killed fourteen people. Civilians expressed their outrage to local reporters, but that was as far as things went. With the military in effective control of the country, its soldiers could do anything they wanted.

A couple of days after the clash, a soldier with a Kalashnikov stopped my car near the Presidential residence. The walls of the houses by the roadside had been sprayed with bullets. Ibrahim, a Malian who was with me, reminded me that the President’s house had been attacked twice in 2012. It had happened first during the initial coup. Then, a few weeks after the interim President, Dioncounda Traoré, was sworn in, a mob of soldiers and civilians stormed the palace, stripped him naked, and beat him badly. “The soldiers did not behave properly,” Ibrahim scowled. “They also took things—televisions, refrigerators, curtains. It was very shameful.”

Now the Army was moving north to assist the French in holding the newly liberated towns. For many of these towns’ residents, this was little comfort. The Army, made up mostly of black southerners, is deeply distrusted by the light-skinned inhabitants of the north. Some northerners are of Moroccan extraction, and consider themselves as much Arab as Malian; others are ethnically linked to the Tuaregs, who have been essentially at war with the south since independence. In the course of five decades, the Tuaregs have launched several uprisings, which have been brutally put down. These attempts at holding the country together had, in their merciless implementation, further estranged its two halves. Now, as the soldiers moved toward Timbuktu, they were again behaving badly; reports were coming back of drunkenness, beatings, and, in some towns, summary executions.

A large, poor state straddling the River Niger and bisected by the Sahel—the great drought belt that separates the forests of southern Africa from the vast Saharan wasteland—Mali has few conspicuous advantages. Like many former colonies, it has made fitful progress as an independent nation: its recent history contains a failed attempt at revolutionary socialism, an abortive merger with Senegal, a couple of border wars, three coups, and one long military dictatorship. Its first free elections came only in 1992.

But, until recently, Mali was regarded as a modest success among African states, having avoided the large-scale civil wars that ravaged many of its neighbors. Despite its large Muslim majority, it was renowned for a spirit of moderation and tolerance, with most people practicing the comparatively relaxed, cheerful Sufi brand of Islam. This has permitted a rich culture to flourish, and, for a number of Malians I talked with, the Islamists’ cultural depredations seemed as offensive as their political dominance. The director of the National Museum, Samuel Sidibé, showed me a number of old wooden fetish gods that fleeing northerners had brought in, hoping that he would preserve them. He was still enraged. “The Islamists’ ideology cannot be spread without destroying culture,” he said. The museum, three large buildings situated in a splendid expanse of park, is a reminder that Mali is a place of long and diverse artistic traditions. Its rooms hold intricately woven and elaborately decorated textiles, gold jewelry and ornaments, and stylized sculptures of iron, wood, and terra cotta, representing a spectrum of human activity from farming to war and maternity.

The cultural scene is still thriving. The portrait photographer Malick Sidibé, who chronicled Bamako life in the nineteen-sixties, recently became the first photographer to win a lifetime-achievement award at the Venice Biennale. Malians are also fixtures on the world-music scene, with Ali Farka Touré, Salif Keita, and Amadou and Mariam especially renowned. Every year since 2001, Mali has hosted the Festival in the Desert, a three-day musical extravaganza at which foreign bands come to play alongside their Malian counterparts. Last year, the special guest was Bono.

In Mali, music is the maximum expression of public emotion, and musicians are essential for every kind of celebration. The jihadis’ ban on music was especially devastating. Many musicians had deserted the north, including Khaira Arby, one of the country’s best-known singers, whom I met one afternoon in the house she had rented in Bamako. A regal woman in her fifties, wearing a bold red-and-beige print dress, Arby was seated in a heavily upholstered living room, where she was rehearsing with several young guitarists. The aroma of burning frankincense filled the air. Children sat obliviously in front of a TV on the carpeted floor, watching a French version of “The X-Factor.”

Arby told me that she was in Bamako when the jihadis took Timbuktu, and she had stayed there ever since. Musicians she knew in the north told her that the jihadis had destroyed their instruments and sent her a message. “They threatened to cut off my tongue,” she said sourly. She continued to record new music, but she felt that she was in limbo, and wanted nothing more than to return home. So far, Timbuktu was too insecure for her to go back.

Not long after I arrived in Mali, I went to see a storyteller named Muhammad Djinni. In his seventies, with a worn, lined face, Djinni sat on a low stool in the alleyway of his house, wearing a dirty saffron smock. He was a butcher, like his father. But when he was young he had hung around old soldiers and his town’s most renowned historian, and in this manner he had learned a great deal. People came to him to learn their tribal history, especially orphans, who were always eager to know their real origins.

“What history do you want to hear?” he asked me.

I asked him to tell me about the French.

“The dominations we have had, we didn’t call for any of them,” Djinni said. “They just came. When the French came, we were surprised. We didn’t know why they had come. They would take your kids, and you wouldn’t know where they were, sometimes for years. Later, you would see your son and know that he was a soldier.”

Djinni was born in 1938, in the house he lived in now. “I grew up under the French—I saw many Frenchmen,” he said. They had forced him to go to school when he was nine, he said, but he had run away after two months; his father wanted him to learn the family trade. Life under the French had been simple, Djinni recalled. “It was easy because we did everything they said. The French named chiefs for each area of Timbuktu, and when they wanted to do something they called them and told them what to do.”

I asked what it was it like seeing the French return after fifty-three years.

“It was like a dream,” Djinni said. “They came to free us, and removed the noose from our necks.”

Many Malians seemed thrilled to have been rescued. On February 2nd, five days after French troops reached Timbuktu, Hollande was flown in for a brief, joyous reception in the dusty central square. In front of a cheering crowd, he cautioned that the Islamists still posed a threat, but declared, “We have liberated this town.” For a moment, Hollande seemed to approach the grandeur of de Gaulle—a rarity for a man known during his electoral campaign as Mr. Normal. The intervention was a coup de foudre for Hollande, whose approval ratings had slid well below the halfway mark; sixty-three per cent of his citizens endorsed the invasion. In Mali, French troops were met by crowds waving the tricolor and chanting “Merci, France.” Malians began referring to the French President as Papa Hollande, and during his quick visit they gave him a camel as a token of gratitude. Hollande declared his appearance there to be “the most important day of my political life.” The camel was left in Timbuktu, where its host family innocently made it into tagine.

I made my way to Timbuktu with a force of a hundred and fifty French marines, who drove from Bamako in a three-day convoy in order to relieve the troops there. The marines moved in a light column of armored personnel carriers and open jeeps, without the heavy anti-I.E.D. armor that U.S. Army vehicles have. They were watchful with Malian civilians—this was unfamiliar territory for most of them—but there was a great deal of joking around, too. The French in Mali, unlike the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, enjoyed the advantage of a common language, and some shared history, with the citizens. Along the way, soldiers broke open their ration boxes, some of them complete with canned Camembert, to distribute to children.

There was danger out there, even so. After the French strikes, Mali’s Islamists fled to remote mountain hideouts to regroup. In the town of Gao, they had begun to strike back, sending suicide bombers on motorbikes. Outside Timbuktu, a sizable Islamist convoy had been spotted, and jihadis were suspected of hiding in the surrounding villages. A few more French soldiers had been killed as the campaign wore on, and the men in the convoy were taking no chances; at night our camps were like wagon trains, the vehicles pulled up in concentric circles, with sentinels on the perimeter.

However marginal and remote Mali may seem to Westerners, its travails exemplify the security problems posed by neglected places in the age of Islamist terror. With little effort, criminal and terrorist groups can seize countries, or parts of them—just as narcotraffickers have effectively taken over West African states like Guinea Bissau. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Islamist cause has grown more popular, and tensions have risen throughout the Maghreb, the northwestern region of North Africa. In 2006, a franchise of Al Qaeda formed in the area, calling itself Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). It originated in the nineteen-nineties, in Algeria, where a decade-long Islamist insurgency was crushed at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. That confrontation left behind bitter memories and a core group of survivors, who gained further expertise in Iraq and Afghanistan and new adherents throughout the region.

The Arab Spring provided the jihadis with an unusual opportunity. Before 2011, the Mediterranean coast of Africa—the great borderland facing Europe from the south—was guarded by a series of secular states, where Islamists were ruthlessly pursued, jailed, and killed. Now only two of those states, Algeria and Morocco, remain, leaving a new, more chaotic political environment. In Libya last September, Islamist extremists mounted a murderous attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. In April, Al Qaeda carried out a car-bombing attack against the French Embassy in Tripoli.

Mali, like the other weak, underpopulated states of the Sahel, is ideally situated for outlaws. Its northern territory is a hub for jihadis and smugglers for the same reason that Timbuktu was an ancient trading center: it offers easy access to Europe, and to the rest of West Africa and North Africa. From here, guns and insurgents and immigrants can be trafficked along the old caravan routes that once carried slaves, salt, and ivory. Even before the jihadis came, Azawad was a sanctuary for kidnappers, a place where government emissaries went to negotiate ransoms and get their people back.

But the West has largely ignored the region. On the French convoy, the officers grilled me politely about why the Americans had not got openly involved in Mali. Initially, their government had requested help in refuelling aircraft, and the U.S. had responded by asking France to repay its costs, of about seventeen million dollars. Although the request was later rescinded, it left the distinct impression that the Obama Administration was either extremely cautious or simply uninterested.

France’s European allies had also done very little, and the young commander of the convoy, Captain Aurélien, said that the lack of solidarity had been disappointing. “This is a French area, because of history, but we don’t have the resources to do it alone. We need a collective effort to defeat terrorism in this area.” With Europe’s economies as bad as they were, he doubted that help would come. “If the Islamists gain a foothold here, it will not be good,” he said. “This is the doorstep to all of Europe, not only France.”

These days, no bridge connects the lower part of Mali to Timbuktu, which sits on a desert plain about eight miles from the northern bank of the Niger. Travellers from the south must cross on a flat barge propelled by motor-powered canoes lashed alongside. Near the landing, on a bare riverbank, is a cluster of stalls made out of sticks, and when I arrived it was market day. Several Tuaregs were there, dressed in indigo robes and turbans, one wearing a sword in a leather scabbard and gold-rimmed sunglasses that concealed his eyes. Women carried dried hides on their heads. Small families, led by men with beards and wooden staffs, walked out of the desert to wait for the barge to come.

Timbuktu is a small, unlovely city in shades of brown and gray, a warren of low, flat-roofed homes made of mud or concrete. Interspersed are beehive-shaped tents covered with hides and scrap—the hovels of the nomadic Bella, former slaves who remain in serflike conditions, working as goatherds and as servants for their former owners. Other than one paved street, the roads are dirt. At the outer edges, the city peters out amid sand dunes and piles of uncollected refuse. In Timbuktu, as in many parts of Africa, plastic rubbish is so prevalent as to seem part of a new ecology.

Two weeks after its liberation, Timbuktu was subdued and wary. Many of the city’s fifty-five thousand inhabitants had fled after the Islamist takeover, and more when the French invasion began. Perhaps a third of its prewar population remained. Most of the shop fronts in the downtown marketplace were shuttered, and homes stood empty. Like vandals, the Islamists had scrawled graffiti and painted over road signs that showed human and animal images, leaving messy swatches of brown paint. Hair salons, which in Mali advertise their services with portraits of men and women, had also been targeted. There was little electricity, and not much water; the Islamists had also destroyed the city’s telecommunications system before they left.

There was no visible authority. The French military was based a couple of miles outside of town, at a small airport, and, except for several daily patrols in jeeps and armored cars, it was an unseen presence. Across the street from the grand mosque, a group of Malian soldiers lounged amid crumbling buildings in a colonial-era barracks. The town hall had been vandalized, its computers stolen or wrecked, its archives trashed. The only garbage truck had been shot up, and sat in front of the mayor’s office like a broken yellow toy. The mayor, like many of the civic authorities, had run away.

The Malian Arabs made up much of Timbuktu’s merchant class, and many of them had lived in Abaradjou, a neighborhood of well-built stone houses. Most of the homes had been ransacked; their doors and windows were gone, and their contents plundered. The shops had also been raided, the metal security doors yawning open, the interiors gutted. Virtually all the Malian Arabs, like the light-skinned Tuaregs, had fled when the French invasion began, making their way to refugee camps on the border with Mauritania or to villages in the desert. (The city’s few Christians were already gone, having left to escape the Islamists.) Timbuktu was no longer a city of several races; except for a few stragglers, there were only black Malians left.

Hollande had declared that France’s troops would begin withdrawing by April, leaving the area to an all-African force. But even though the city had been formally liberated, few people felt secure enough to return. Many feared that the Islamists were lying low until the French left. For the Arabs and Tuaregs, the threat was more immediate; they believed that their safety was at risk from the Malian Army.

There was only one hotel open, the Colombe, a dusty two-story structure, made of dun-colored brick, where the electricity and water ran for only two hours a day. In the evenings, the few paying guests shared the bar uneasily with Malian military men, armed and in uniform, who sat around drinking beer until they were in a sullen stupor.

My translator in Timbuktu was Idrissa, an unemployed tour guide in his twenties. He had learned English from a Peace Corps volunteer, before the organization pulled out of Mali, in April, 2012. Idrissa had earned a living taking intrepid Western travellers on expeditions into the desert, but he hadn’t had any customers in a year. He wore a turban and an electric-green robe and carried a cell phone with a startlingly loud call-to-prayer ringtone.

In the ten months of Islamist rule, there had been an execution by firing squad, an amputation, and several whippings in Timbuktu. One impoverished couple had been whipped because they were not married, though they had a child and the woman was pregnant with another. A young woman was accused of fornication and given ninety-five lashes. In the central square, Idrissa had witnessed the beating of one of the jihadis’ own men, who had been accused by his comrades of raping a young girl. The spectators loudly criticized the jihadis for a double standard. “Everyone was angry because they didn’t kill him,” Idrissa said. Afterward, the jihadis had gone on the local radio station and warned that anyone who spoke badly about their men would be killed.

Near the town center was an unfinished hotel complex, built in single-level faux-Islamic style, which Idrissa explained had been financed by Muammar Qaddafi. We climbed a sand dune behind the hotel and looked down into a natural depression that had been filled with water, forming a large pond. Idrissa said that until recently it had been dry, and that it was where the jihadis had executed a man who was accused of murdering someone in a nearby village. Idrissa, along with many other people, had been summoned by the Islamists to gather on the dunes above the killing ground; jihadis with guns kept them in place. As the victim’s family stood by, they carried out the sentence. At the crucial moment, Idrissa had turned away, but he had heard the gunshot, and then the guards shouting, “Allahu Akbar!”—“God is great.”

On the day I visited, there were a dozen women and girls washing clothes at the edge of the pond. Some were standing waist deep in the water to clean themselves as they washed. As we walked around, little children danced and chanted, “Mali, França, Mali, França.” It was a new kind of game for them. Their parents smiled and waved.

Timbuktu, at the edge of the vast Sahara, has served for centuries as a repository of culture. In 1510, the Moroccan geographer and scholar Leo Africanus visited, and described a city of veiled women and thatched mud dwellings, with a large mosque and an adjoining palace, and a thriving market in which European fabrics were sold and great amounts of gold traded. “The people of Timbuktu are of a peaceful nature,” he wrote. “They have a custom of almost continuously walking about the city in the evening (except for those that sell gold), between 10 P.M. and 1 A.M., playing musical instruments and dancing.” Timbuktu was ruled by an immensely rich warrior king, whom Africanus described as merciless yet cultivated: “There are in Timbuktu numerous judges, teachers, and priests, all properly appointed by the king. He greatly honors learning. Many handwritten books imported from Barbary are also sold. There is more profit made from this commerce than from all other merchandise.”

That legacy persists. In the center of town is the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, a modern archive library—all clean lines and sand-colored planes, to suit the surroundings—where tens of thousands of the city’s ancient documents were preserved. During the jihadis’ invasion, all the researchers fled, and when Idrissa and I arrived the building was still abandoned. A custodian let us inside, in exchange for a tip, and allowed us to wander with him through floors of mostly empty rooms. He showed us in to a locked storeroom filled with ancient manuscripts: shelves of little yellowing bundles. The custodian explained that the room was intact because the jihadis had not known about it. Most of the other manuscripts had, like the city’s several private collections, been hidden away by a network of librarians.

The jihadis had destroyed a few hundred documents that they found in the preservation room, where fragile pages were microfilmed and then preserved in specially made folders or boxes. The custodian led us out to a garden patio, where the charred remains of the documents lay. I was surprised to see that they had not been cleaned up; in the ash piles, there were scraps of ancient paper with identifiable calligraphy. The custodian said that no one from the center had returned, and so he was leaving everything as it was.

As well as a literary center, Timbuktu was known as the home of shrines to three hundred and thirty-three Sufi saints. The Islamists, who regarded the shrines as idolatrous, demolished as many as they could. In the Old City, a labyrinth of dirt alleys, was the grand mosque, built in 1327 by Mansa Mūsā, the “gold” emperor. Idrissa pointed to piles of dirt outside the rear wall, and explained that they were the remains of the first two shrines that the jihadis attacked. He had been there that day. “They blocked the street both ways, held people back with Kalashnikovs, and destroyed them.”

Before that, they had gone to the imam in the mosque, to inform him of their intentions. He had told them, “Go ahead. You are going to do what you are going to do.” The imam had maintained this neutral policy throughout the jihadi occupation, and told his flock to go along with whatever they ordered, so as to avoid violence. Everything was God’s will, he said.

At another mosque, the Sidi Yahya, a piece of sheet metal was propped up over an entrance to the back courtyard. There had been a door there, a massive wooden slab covered with geometric metal decorations, which had traditionally been kept sealed, in the belief that it led to a tomb of saints. Idrissa told me that the door was hundreds of years old, and that, according to an old superstition, if it was ever broken, the world would end. During the occupation, a squad of Islamists arrived with axes and destroyed the door. Afterward, they jeered at onlookers, “Has the world ended?”

In many respects, Azawad was regulated with almost parodic strictness; at one point, a spokesman decreed that tombs more than six inches tall would not be tolerated. But, compared with the harshest applications of Sharia law, the rule of the jihadis was not so stringent. At times, they seemed to be as concerned with establishing a government as with enforcing the holy writ.

On a nondescript street near the center of town is a small boutique hotel, La Maison, owned by a Frenchwoman. It is a simple two-story stone building, its rooms hung with Moroccan lamps and furnished with cushions and rugs. The jihadists evidently approved of La Maison’s style, because they took it over during their stay and turned it into their Sharia court. I went there with Cicce, a local man who had been arrested by the jihadis and held for three days. When we arrived, a caretaker wordlessly brought out great old-fashioned keys and allowed us into a dusty downstairs room, with furniture stacked up, where some of the jihadis had lived. The upstairs had functioned as the court’s chambers. Suspects were held under guard in the hotel’s restaurant; the trials took place next door, in a spacious room with two rugs on the floor and a chest of drawers that was used to store evidence. A short coil of rope, used for tying suspects’ hands, had been left behind.

Cicce had been arrested at a checkpoint, when jihadist fighters found a gris-gris—a traditional good-luck charm—in his glove compartment. “I thought my life was over from the moment they brought me in,” he said. He showed me where he had knelt on one rug in front of three judges, who sat cross-legged on the other. He had explained that an elderly man to whom he had given a ride presented the gris-gris to him in gratitude. He had thrown it in his glove compartment and forgotten about it. The judges asked him again and again about the incident, but also discussed religion with him, as if to test his fealty. The trial had gone on for many hours, and he had said what he could and hoped they believed him. But they had treated him courteously, he said. When it was lunchtime, they invited him to share their food. Eventually, he had been released, and considered himself very lucky.

The Malians’ reasons for complying with the Islamists were complex. After centuries of subservience, they understood when they had to accede in order to survive. The north of Mali is a neglected place, with no highway and few signs of development; what money flowed into the area in recent years came not from the government but from Qaddafi and from international charitable agencies. Kidnappers and other criminals operate with impunity in the surrounding desert. According to at least a few locals I talked to, the Islamists were tolerated because they brought order to Timbuktu. “The Islamists fought corruption, and the privilege of one citizen over another,” one told me. “Whether the person is white or black, they are lashed with the same whip.”

The jihadis had also made some effort to cultivate the city’s residents. Although they silenced most journalists, they allowed a middle-aged radio reporter named Yehia Tandina to continue working. When I visited Tandina, at his house, he explained why. “The Islamists wanted to make propaganda through me,” he said, matter-of-factly. “At the beginning, I had trouble with their fighters, but then they gave me an authorization.” He showed me the document, on Al Qaeda letterhead: stamped by the “Sécurité Islamique,” with a logo of a crossed Kalashnikov and sword, it was a tangible sign of the Islamists’ attempt to acquire the trappings of official power.

We were sitting in his family room, which had cushions around the edges and a small desk with a Dell laptop. Outside, in an alley courtyard, women ate rice from a communal bowl. Tandina wore Western clothes: tan trousers and a blue long-sleeved shirt. He explained that the first rebels who had arrived in Timbuktu were the Tuareg separatists, and there were no problems. “Then, on day two, the Islamists came,” he recalled. He had asked the leader what he wanted. Naming the northern towns of Mali, he had said, “Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal are Muslim towns, and we want to make Sharia in them. We are not asking. We are saying what we are doing, and we’re here to make Sharia.”

Tandina told me that afterward the people of Timbuktu, who were mostly moderate Muslims, had coped as well as they could. “We created a crisis committee, and if the Islamists wanted something to be done they went through the council,” he said. “The council didn’t want violence, and so it advised the people to do whatever the Islamists said. For example, the Islamists once wanted to collect money from each family for the electricity, and the crisis council went and politely collected the money from the people. There were also times when the council members disagreed. They wanted the boys and girls to have separate schools, and when we opposed them they said, ‘O.K., then, no school.’ So the schools closed after that.”

One of the few schools to stay open was a religious academy, led by a marabout, or Koranic teacher, named Baba Moulay al Arby. A thin man of thirty-four, Arby received me graciously in his home, which doubled as his school, and showed me the downstairs room where he held classes. Dozens of wooden prayer tablets were stacked against the wall. In a marabout school, groups of children learn the Koran by rote from the age of six to about fifteen. “Those who want to go on to learn other topics, like history, math, or geography, go on to a madrasah,” Arby explained.

Arby, one of the few Arabs remaining in the city, had a mustache and wore a brown djellabah. His family had been in Timbuktu since the time of his great-great-great-grandfather, he emphasized; he was a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. “I know Islam better than these Islamists, but I was afraid of them and disliked them, because they are violent,” he said. “What they do in the name of Islam is just to trick the people.” He said that he had stayed on “because I have the support of the people of Timbuktu. I teach their children.”

His school had fared little better under the liberators. He normally had two hundred pupils, he said, but, since the French arrived and the town’s Arabs had fled, his classes had been reduced to forty. “Most of the Arabs were afraid of the French and the Malian Army,” he said. “They knew what they would do.” The Arabs feared that their houses and businesses would be looted, he said; a new home he was building had been broken into and plundered.

Outside the city, an A.P. reporter named Rukmini Callimachi had found shallow graves containing the bodies of two Malian Arab men, their hands bound behind their backs. Both had been shot in the head. The day before I arrived, an Army unit had grabbed eight other Arab men off the streets, including an older man named Ali, who had given interviews to journalists after the French arrived. The men had not been heard of since, and most people believed that they had been murdered. When I mentioned the killings and disappearances to Arby, he responded carefully. “I don’t think those killed were innocents,” he said, and added, “Ali was not an Islamist, but his children were. The military have him, and I don’t know what will happen to him. This kind of thing makes me afraid.”

He was in touch with some of the Arabs who had fled into the surrounding desert, and many of them were hungry and increasingly desperate. “I have talked to the military and arranged to send them food,” he said. “They were not with the Islamists, but they are afraid, and ashamed of what the Arabs did.” He had sent his mother and sisters to Niger for safety, he said, but he believed that Timbuktu’s “innocent” Arabs would eventually be able to return. The Arabs had owned most of the city’s businesses and had provided most of the employment, and they were needed. “If the imams and the notables come back and give their excuses, the black people will excuse them,” Arby said.

Two weeks after Hollande visited Timbuktu, Colonel Paul Gèze, the commander of the French invasion force, was getting ready to leave. In the dirt square where Hollande was greeted as a liberator—and where the Islamists carried out most of their whippings—the city’s residents organized a celebration for him. Gèze, a burly man with a gray buzz cut, sat with a few fellow-officers and local dignitaries in plastic chairs that had been arranged for the V.I.P.s. A bunting in the red, yellow, and green of the Malian flag hung around the edges of the plaza, alongside a banner with the French tricolor that read “Merci à La France et Les Pays Amis.” Crowds of people had gathered noisily all around the square, where gendarmes and men with sticks sought to keep them in place. There were drummers, and women singing and laughing. A group of male dancers wearing cows’ horns on their heads represented the butchers of Timbuktu, and one man with a black turban wore a hot-pink robe that was festooned, pirate style, with a great sword and crossed belts.

As the sun set, a kind of order prevailed, and the speeches began. A young Malian man performed a hip-hop verse he had composed in honor of the French. Commander Gèze smiled graciously throughout, and then he spoke, praising the people of Timbuktu and promising undying French support. As dancers came before the V.I.P.s to perform, my eyes were drawn to a man standing nearby. He was extremely tall and broad, with skin the color of old mahogany, and he wore a tunic made out of what looked like a grain sack. On the front were some words I couldn’t make out, and on the back was an image of a man sexually penetrating a woman from behind.

While the dance troupe performed, the man began a performance of his own. He pulled out a large black dildo, strapped it around his waist, and began grinding lasciviously, wearing a lewd expression. Eventually, he stopped dancing and stood, slowly stroking his dildo. People in the crowd stared at him with fixed, unbelieving looks; others smiled, or put hands over their mouths to suppress laughs. It was plain that everyone was familiar with his performance, and that many people were delighted. A pair of officials flanked him and tried to get him to stop. He pushed them away and, with a mischievous look, continued dancing.

It seemed extraordinary that Malian society could accommodate such opposing impulses. For most of the past year, jihadis had meted out lashings in the town square, where a man now danced around pretending to masturbate—and no one seemed overly perturbed by it. Idrissa explained that the man was a griot, one of the hereditary West African figures who carry on the oral traditions of their communities, through storytelling, history, poetry, or music. This particular one, according to Idrissa, was a bit of a rascal. When I asked him to translate the words on the griot’s tunic, he refused: “They are very bad words. You have seen the picture, so you can imagine.”

A few days later, we found the griot in his home, an improvised mud dwelling in the dunes at the edge of town. His wife was peeling vegetables on a patio, accompanied by several young children. The griot, wearing trousers and a shirt, invited me to sit with him under a veranda of woven grass, where songbirds flitted in and out. I asked if they were his birds. He gave a surprised laugh and said no, they just lived there.

His name was Boubakar Traore, but he preferred to be called Chief Firga, after the name of his village. He had been born a banya, or slave, of the Songhay people, and had taken on the role of a highly sexed buffo as an escape. Around the time of his birth, forty-seven years ago, slavery had been formally outlawed in Mali, but in the north the tradition of hereditary servitude persisted. The slave trade in Mali had a tangled legacy. “At the beginning of all this history, there were the poor black people and then the rich, intelligent people,” he said. “They would take you by force and make you work for them. If they lost their wealth, they would take you to the market and sell you. Later, some of the slaves got some money and learning, or became Muslims, and were able to buy their freedom.”

When Boubakar was a young teen-ager, he came to understand that his parents were slaves, and that he was, too. He went to his owners, a local family called Heydara, and asked if he was their slave. Embarrassed, they told him that slavery was a thing of the past, and that they thought of him as a son. But he knew the truth. Later, he told his parents that by law they were free, but they were afraid and couldn’t change. “They were slaves until the end of their lives,” he said. “My parents’ generation had no rights. My generation is the first to demand their rights.”

Boubakar’s father told him that he shouldn’t live with bitterness, and encouraged him to become a griot, as his grandfather had been, and his grandfather’s grandfather. Boubakar learned that if he donned his costume and went to the homes of his former masters they would pay him to go away. He had made a career of haunting them, appearing at their special occasions and brandishing the dildo. If necessary, he added, he blackmailed them: “I can tell stories about my former masters, and since I am their former slave, people will believe me. This gives me power over them.” He had been successful, he felt. “They paid for this house,” he said, smiling, and waved at his hovel. He said that he did it because he had resolved not to go through life concealing the fact that he had been a slave. Although he conceded that he was not a truly free man, because he lived off his former owners, he had found a way to make use of his heritage.

While the Islamists were in Timbuktu, Boubakar concealed his costume. The day I had seen him in the town square was his first day out in ten months. He had feared the Islamists, he said. “They cut off people’s hands and told our women that their clothes were not suitable. I think they wanted slavery to come back.”

Boubakar had ten children, and he was training several of them to be griots, including a couple of his daughters. When I expressed surprise at the idea of female griots, Boubakar explained how it worked. Former slave women wearing nothing underneath their dresses showed up at the social occasions of their former owners. “If they don’t pay them, they throw up their dresses and try to sit on them.” He laughed heartily.

Boubakar had no national history he could be proud of. Slavery was illegal now, but its social structures remained in place, and the state had provided no means of overcoming them. Being a griot, on the other hand, was something he could proudly pass on to his children; during his performances, he could make his former masters submit to him. But the larger question of belonging to Mali had no easy answer. Even Boubakar’s former owners considered themselves Arabs, and did not feel truly Malian. Where did that leave him?

As I prepared to leave Timbuktu, President Obama announced that he had sent a hundred U.S. troops to neighboring Niger, to work at a new base for surveillance drones that would help the French track Al Qaeda. A week later, Chadian troops fighting with the French announced that two AQIM chiefs had been killed. But the Malian Army seemed far from ready to take over. In the main garrison, I found Colonel Kéba Sangaré, the newly arrived military commander for the city. A courteous man in his early forties, Sangaré insisted that people felt safer since his forces had arrived, and pointed out that the schools had reopened. “People now walk around freely, and Western journalists are able to go where they want. We’re slowly moving into a new phase, in which we are depending on the support of the local population to defend against the insurgents.”

In fact, he and his men relied far more on the French, which Sangaré acknowledged cheerfully. “We are not capable of taking care of all of Mali,” he said. “We have a big land and a small population and Army, and we don’t have the technology to see everywhere.” His own area of command, he pointed out, was two hundred and twenty thousand square miles.

Sangaré’s boss for Opération Serval was Captain Aurélien, my host on the convoy to Timbuktu. One morning, Aurélien came to the Hotel Colombe to speak with a group of reporters. Security had been reëstablished, but only wherever the French military was at any given time. He explained that the French would remain at the airport and had begun patrols around the city. He warned journalists against straying too far. “There may still be terrorists among the Arabs in the villages outside the city. I ask for your help in this matter—please don’t go there.”

When I mentioned that Hollande had said that his troops would hand off to the Malians by the end of April, Aurélien was noncommittal. “I am not sure about the dates,” he said. “I think it’s a little more open-ended.” A few feet away, in the restaurant, a uniformed Malian soldier sat drinking beer in a determined way. It was eleven in the morning.

In Bamako, I went to discuss Mali’s prospects with a well-regarded political activist named Tiébilé Dramé. A tall, affable man in his fifties, Dramé told me apologetically that he had not gone to the north since the French had ousted the Islamists. He had helped to organize fact-finding teams, but a recent trip he hoped to go on was cancelled for security reasons. When I told him about the disappearances and murders, he looked gloomy: “The country is in a real crisis, and too few people seem to be aware of the extent of it.”

He thought that the Western powers had allowed the Islamist occupation to persist. “My conclusion until recently,” he said, “was that the U.S. government did not believe that the situation in Mali represented a threat to international security—that’s the bottom line, I believe.” A few months earlier, he said, a senior U.S. diplomat in the region had bluntly asked whether AQIM represented a threat to the United States. “Can you imagine?” Dramé said, with a disbelieving look.

Across town, the U.S. Ambassador, Mary Beth Leonard, offered a robust defense of America’s role in Mali. She explained that the government had given logistical support to the French mission, spent a hundred and twenty million dollars on humanitarian aid, and pledged an additional hundred million to a U.N.-backed stabilization program. (There were also reports of small numbers of Special Forces at work in Mali.) “But we cannot deal with the Malian military until after it holds elections and democracy is restored,” Leonard added. “We are very firm on what we think Mali’s priorities are. Governance is the main issue. Reconciliation is also near the top of the list.” She believed that the Islamists could be defeated only if all the groups in the north, including the Tuaregs—who had broken their ties with the Islamists during the French invasion—were brought to the table. There was still a war to be fought, though, Leonard said: “AQIM did not prevail on the battlefield, so it will shift to asymmetrical tactics. We’re all waiting to see what those tactics are going to be.”

Soon after our meeting, AQIM said that it had executed one of the six French hostages its forces were holding in North Africa. A week later, in Timbuktu, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the airport, killing a Malian soldier and wounding several others. Ten days after that, another bomber and two squads of gunmen attacked simultaneously at points around the city. One group sneaked into the back of the Hotel Colombe and opened fire on the rooms where several Westerners and Malian officials were lodged. It took forty-eight hours, and several more firefights, before the town was quiet again. On a visit to Mali in April, Laurent Fabius, the French Foreign Minister, announced that France intended to leave a permanent force of a thousand troops, in order to “fight terrorism.”

In the end, the United States’ hands-off strategy seemed to have had benefits. The U.S. had paid relatively little; the French did most of the work; and, for the moment, Al Qaeda was on the defensive. But the jihadis’ ten months of statehood may have long consequences. The short existence of the Islamic state of Azawad showed extremists that the West is more fractious, and perhaps weaker, than before, and less eager to take on armed fighters in faraway lands. It seemed likely that those jihadis who survived might want to repeat their experiment, perhaps with greater sophistication. In the meantime, the extremists hiding out across the region have shown their ability to strike, as they did in Niger, where suicide bombers killed twenty-six people in May.

If Mali is to stop being an appealing haven for terrorists, it must somehow pull together as a cohesive nation. But a considerable challenge remains. Mali has few leaders of note, and no civic culture adequate to the task of demanding more of its politicians—not to mention better behavior from its Army. When I met Tiébilé Dramé, he told me that the country badly needed “a national discussion about how we can lay a new foundation for democracy. Equally important are the internal discussions we Malians need to have about how we are going to maintain peace and hold the country together.” At the moment, he said, Mali was ruled by “a cohabitation between the coup and the constitution.” There was a transitional President, but the rogue elements of the military still exercised enormous influence. “The truth is,” he said, “no one really seems to be in charge of anything.”

In the past few weeks, though, there have been some promising signs. New elections are scheduled for July 28th, and it is possible that they will help allay the problem of governance. On April 25th, the U.N. decided to deploy peacekeeping troops. In mid-June, Dramé announced that he had completed weeks of negotiations, in which the insurgent Tuaregs of the north had agreed to stand down and, for the moment, rejoin the Malian nation.

There are many countries with unresolved sectarian and ethnic differences, and some of them manage to move forward, however fitfully. With help, it should be possible for Mali, despite all its problems, to limp along. But a comprehensive political solution seems far off. Until one can be found, Mali’s best hope may be its cultural verve and its spirit of tolerance, which, at least on the scale of a neighborhood or a town, can reconcile its people as politics cannot.

When I was in Bamako, public festivities were still on hold, but one Friday night the dimly lit Djandjo Club was open for business. The headliner was the Malian guitarist and singer Baba Salah, a thin man in his thirties, who wore a dark suit and a white shirt with a collar worthy of Billy Eckstine. As his band members set up on a nearby stage backed with mirrored glass, we sat and talked.

He was from Gao, he said, and though he and his wife and children were lucky enough to live in Bamako, many of his friends and relatives had endured life under the Islamists. “After a year of oppression, the people there had lost hope,” he said. “It had become clear that no one had the ability to do anything about the situation. So it was an incredible relief when the French came.” He was waiting a little while longer before he went back for a visit. “The cities are liberated, but the roads are not yet safe,” he said. He was frightened when the jihadis charged south from Timbuktu. He was known to have spoken out against them, and he was concerned that they would make him stop playing. The melancholy title track of his latest album was “Dangay,” which means “north.” In the song, he asks listeners to pray for the people of the region.

The club began filling up with exuberantly dressed men and women, who waved and smiled at Baba Salah. Most of them drank Coca-Cola; a few drank beer. There seemed to be no stigma to adhering more or less zealously to the faith.

Baba Salah’s guitar was a black-and-white Schechter, and before he got up to play he told me how he acquired it. In 2000, he was on his first trip outside Mali, touring with the great Oumou Sangaré, and in New York the songwriter Jackson Browne came to watch. “Afterward he called me over and said, ‘You play like an angel. What can I do for you?’ ” Baba Salah told me. “I didn’t know what to say. He said, ‘It’s O.K., I know what to do.’ So later he flew from California to here. I was living like a bachelor in a really small room. We played together. He said to me, ‘This is the guitar I play, and I want you to have it.’ ” Baba Salah had played Browne’s guitar ever since.

Onstage, he picked up the guitar and said a few words about how happy he was that the north was free, which drew applause and joyful shouts. Then he and his band began playing. Their music, driven by his guitar, was a looping, riffing, electric sound that evoked the sixties underground yet was distinctly African. Baba Salah’s singing was casual, comfortable, and as he launched into the first song people filled the floor to dance. ♦

PROFILES
Ed Ruscha’s L.A.

An artist in the right place.

by Calvin Tomkins

If you need cheering up, go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at a painting called “Oof,” by Edward Ruscha. The title and the subject are identical, just those three block letters, each one bigger than your head, in cadmium yellow on a background of cobalt blue. The six-foot-square canvas currently hangs in Gallery 19, on the fourth floor, along with Roy Lichtenstein’s “Girl with Ball,” Andy Warhol’s “Gold Marilyn Monroe” and “Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times,” and other Pop Art trailblazers of the early nineteen-sixties. “Oof” outdoes them all in its immediate, antic impact. This is not the kind of picture that reveals hidden depths on subsequent viewings. Everything is right there, every time, and it never fails to make me feel good.

Ruscha (pronounced Ru-SHAY) was twenty-six when he painted it, in 1963, three years out of art school, living in Los Angeles, and already hitting his stride. He had vetoed the spontaneous, loose-elbow, Abstract Expressionist style that still prevailed at the Chouinard Art Institute, where he studied in the late nineteen-fifties, shortly before it became the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). “They would say, Face the canvas and let it happen, follow your own gestures, let the painting create itself,” he later recalled in an interview, but that didn’t pan out for him. Ruscha had seen, reproduced in the magazine Print, a Jasper Johns collage painting called “Target with Four Faces,” and it had opened up a new range of possibilities. He decided that whatever he was going to do in art would have to be “completely premeditated.”

He made a few Johns-influenced paintings. One showed a can of Spam rocketing through space; in another, a real box of Sun-Maid raisins was flattened on a canvas, above the partly painted-over place name “Vicksburg.” Very soon, he zeroed in on the Johnsian notion of painting words. “It was so simple, and something I could commit to,” he said last winter, when I visited him in Los Angeles. Ruscha, at seventy-five, is lean and fit, and his natural reserve is offset by an easygoing friendliness. We were sitting in the library and office space of his immense, warehouse-like studio in Culver City, which he moved into two years ago. Los Angeles was having a cold snap, the heat wasn’t working, and Ruscha had lent me a heavy-duty parka to wear. “I would settle on a word like ‘boss,’ ” he said. “That was a powerful word to me, and it meant various things—an employer, and a term for something cool. Also, a brand of work clothes.” “Boss” appeared in 1961, black letters on a dark-brown background, and was followed, during the next three years, by “Honk,” “Smash,” “Noise,” “Oof,” “Won’t,” and other word paintings. He chose commonplace, one-syllable words that had what he described as “a certain comedic value.” “Oof” was different—onomatopoeic, for one thing, and funnier. “It had one foot in the world of cartooning,” he explained, speaking slowly and lingering over a word now and then, as though to savor its quiddity. “You get punched in the stomach, and that’s ‘Oof.’ It was so obvious, and so much a part of my growing up in the U.S.A. I felt like it was almost a patriotic word.” Ruscha, who was born in Omaha in 1937, and spent his childhood in Oklahoma City, may be the only living American who can discern patriotism in a grunt. Our conversation was interrupted at this point by Woody, a large, thirteen-year-old mixed-breed and somewhat arthritic dog, who was making plaintive noises; Ruscha got up and helped him out the back door.

“Oof” had an adventurous early life. Ruscha lent it to his childhood friend Mason Williams, and a few years later, when Williams was working as the head comedy writer for the Smothers Brothers, he let Tommy Smothers borrow it. The picture fell off a wall in Smothers’s house and landed face down on a chessboard, whose sharp-tipped metal pieces punctured the canvas in several places. Ruscha took it back, got it repaired, did some repainting, and kept it until 1988, when a group of very wealthy donors bought it for the Museum of Modern Art.

Language has often invaded the visual arts during the past century, but no other artist uses it the way Ruscha does. His early paintings are not pictures of words but words treated as visual constructs. “I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again,” he once said. “I see myself working with two things that don’t even ask to understand each other.”

Los Angeles was largely oblivious of the visual arts in the early nineteen-sixties. Unlike San Francisco, which considered itself the cultural capital of the West, L.A. had no significant art museum, few galleries, and only a handful of people who would even think of buying contemporary art. It did have a crop of obstreperous young artists, though, and in 1962 Walter Hopps, a former U.C.L.A. student who had just been named curator of the quaint, unassuming Pasadena Art Museum, put several of them in a group exhibition there called “New Painting of Common Objects.” It was the first American museum show of what would soon be known as Pop Art, and it included, along with works by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Jim Dine, three recent paintings by Ed Ruscha.

A year later, Ruscha had his first one-man show at the Ferus Gallery, which Hopps and the artist Edward Keinholz had started in 1957, in the back room of an antique shop on North La Cienega Boulevard. In addition to his single-word images, the 1963 Ferus show included the more ambitious “Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights,” an eleven-foot-wide view of the Twentieth Century Fox logo as a three-dimensional monolith, and “Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western,” in which the word and the three objects, meticulously reproduced in their actual sizes, seemed to be trying to escape from the picture. The paintings were priced between a hundred and fifty and four hundred dollars, and six of them were sold—a remarkable début. That same year, Ruscha finished “Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas,” the first of his many paintings, drawings, and prints of gas stations, whose dramatic, raked perspective came from an effect he had observed in old black-and-white films. “You know those movies where a train starts out in the lower-right corner and gradually fills the screen?” he asked. “The gas station is on a diagonal like that, from lower right to upper left. It also had something to do with teachings I picked up in art school, about dividing the picture plane. I didn’t really know what I was up to then, or what direction to take. I was just following these little urges. It was pure joy, to be able to do something like that.”

In 1965, the opening of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in its Wilshire Boulevard location signalled a new era in the city’s cultural development. Ruscha observed the event with another eleven-foot-wide painting that showed the museum complex in all its boxy, corporate-modern banality, but with smoke and flames shooting out of the Ahmanson Building, and not a single human being in sight. “Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire” and several other Ruscha paintings of burning buildings are sometimes cited as evidence of a “dark side” in his art, but they don’t seem dark to me. My guess is that he really liked painting orange flames. The LACMA picture does give rise to thoughts about the city’s expanding cultural pretensions, though, and I asked Ruscha whether this had been part of his intention. Not really, he said. “I went on a helicopter ride over L.A., and took some Polaroid pictures of the museum from the air, and it just sort of went on from there.” But the fire? “Well, there’s always a little room for questioning authorities.” Joseph Hirshhorn, the uranium millionaire, bought the painting in 1968, and eventually gave it to the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C. This is a source of undying regret to Michael Govan, the current director of the Los Angeles County Museum, who considers it a quintessential Los Angeles picture.

The engine of Los Angeles culture is Hollywood, but until quite recently there were few connections between the movie crowd and the Los Angeles art community. Film stars who collect art have been extremely rare, and LACMA and the other art institutions that have emerged since 1965 have had amazingly bad luck attracting the financial support of Hollywood moguls. One of the few people with ties to both camps is Ruscha. He has dated starlets, models (Lauren Hutton, Léon Bing), and at least one bona-fide movie star, Samantha Eggar, with whom he lived for several years during the nineteen-eighties. Ruscha made two short, 16-mm. films in the nineteen-seventies, applying traditional Hollywood methods to weird plots. In “Premium,” a man takes a young woman (Bing) to a seedy room, has her strip and lie down on a bed covered with freshly tossed salad, then goes to an expensive hotel room, alone, and eats Premium crackers. “Miracle,” the second film, follows the lead actor’s unexplained transformation, while repairing a carburetor, from a greasy auto mechanic to an immaculate lab technician.

Hollywood films and cinematic perspectives have influenced many of Ruscha’s paintings, but the underlying subject of his work has always been Los Angeles itself. He saw the place for the first time when he was fourteen, on a car trip with his parents, and when he came back in 1956 to go to art school, driving from Oklahoma City with Mason Williams, there were no disappointments. Nearly everything about the city appealed to him—the endless sprawl, the two-story apartment houses with outdoor stairways, the hot rods, the jazz clubs, the billboards, the sunrises and sunsets, the boulevards that led to the ocean.

He roomed in a succession of boarding houses and cheap apartments in the Hollywood area, and took restaurant jobs to stay afloat. His parents were paying his tuition at Chouinard. Ruscha’s father, a strict Catholic and a rigid disciplinarian whose parents came from Germany (where the family name was Rusiska), worked for thirty years as an auditor with the Hartford Insurance Company in Oklahoma City. He had been unhappy about his son’s decision to go to art school, but he changed his mind after reading, in The Saturday Evening Post, that Chouinard was supported largely by Walt Disney, and that many of its students became well-paid animators for the Disney studio. During his second year at Chouinard, Ruscha lived with his former schoolmate Joe Goode and three other Oklahoma-born art students in a ramshackle house in East Hollywood, where the combined rent was sixty dollars a month. Several of them, including Ruscha, had live-in girlfriends. Ever since high school, girls had doted on Ruscha—they found him shy and laconic, but wickedly handsome, and cooler than Cary Grant.

After graduating from Chouinard, in 1960, Ruscha took a full-time job with the Carson/Roberts advertising agency. Although he (and his father) had assumed that he would become a commercial artist, he hated the work and quit after a few months. In 1961, he went to Europe, with his mother and his younger brother, Paul. Their father had died two years earlier, and their older sister, Shelby, had married a Venezuelan engineer and was living in Caracas. Dorothy Ruscha, whose zest for music and books and art had helped to make life in Oklahoma City more bearable for the three children, decided it was time that she, too, saw more of the world. They started in Paris, where Dorothy bought a blue Citroën 2CV, and during the next four months they drove through France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, and then Ireland (where her people came from), Scotland, and England. Paul left the tour early, to attend his high-school sweetheart’s graduation. Dorothy flew home from London, and Ruscha, on his own, returned to Paris for a month. Although he made dutiful visits to museums, older art didn’t interest him. He spent most of his time walking the streets and painting small pictures, with oil on paper, of signs (the Art Nouveau entrance to the Metro) and other local insignia.

Stopping off in New York City on his way back, he paid a call on Leo Castelli, whose gallery showed Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. No introduction, no calling beforehand—he just walked in with the Paris paintings under his arm. Castelli, all European charm and suavity, said that Ruscha’s work looked interesting, and told him to stay in touch. Ruscha stayed in touch for twelve years, visiting the gallery on his occasional trips to New York, and in 1973 Castelli became his New York dealer. Ruscha never seriously considered moving East. “That was too big a decision, and too big a jump,” he told me. “It just didn’t feel like it was meant to be.” He wanted to live in Los Angeles, and by the time he returned from Europe he knew that the only thing he could possibly be was an artist. “I could see I was just born for the job, born to watch paint dry,” he said.

Steve Martin and his wife, Anne Stringfield, live near the top of a steep drive in Beverly Hills. Martin is one of the renegade Hollywood stars who love and collect art—early modern and contemporary, although nothing as yet by Ruscha. I had dinner there one night, along with Ruscha and his wife, Danna, a vivacious woman with blond hair and a warm smile. Danna and Ed met in 1965, when Danna was working as an animator for the Hanna-Barbera studio, and they were married in 1967. Their son, Edward Joseph Ruscha, called Eddie, was born a year later. The marriage broke up in 1972, and Ruscha had a number of relationships with other women. His daughter, Sonny Bjornson, who is now in her twenties, works for the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, and is about to be married. Eddie Ruscha, a CalArts graduate who paints and composes music, helps out in his father’s studio every Monday, filling in the backgrounds of some of the large-scale paintings. He and his wife, the artist Francesca Gabbiani, have two children. Ruscha is close to his children and grandchildren, and he has stayed friendly with many of his former girlfriends. He and Danna got together again in the nineteen-eighties, and they remarried in 1988, in Las Vegas, at the same chapel they used the first time.

After dinner, we all drove partway down the hill and stopped at the Ruschas’ house. Its previous owner was the Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar, and nearly every room offered sweeping views of the city. There were paintings by modern and contemporary artists on the walls, but only one, near the kitchen, was by Ruscha. Impressed by the twelve Kandinsky prints in the master bathroom, Martin asked whether we could watch Ed take a shower. A lot of barking came from the other end of the house, where Danna had put Woody and six other dogs she has adopted from rescue shelters. (She has found homes for around two hundred and fifty others.)

Oscar Wilde said that George Bernard Shaw had no enemies but his friends didn’t like him. Ruscha seems to have no enemies and his friends like him, but even old friends, like the artist John Baldessari, sometimes feel that they don’t know him very well. “You have to get through that veil,” Baldessari told me. Many observers have pointed out that human beings almost never appear in Ruscha’s work. During dinner, apropos of nothing, Martin had said, “I’ve known Ed for forty years, but I’ve only known him really well for the last fifteen minutes.”

By the mid-nineteen-sixties, Los Angeles had supplanted San Francisco as the West Coast center for contemporary art. Its art schools drew ambitious students from around the country, and many of them, lulled by the climate and by the availability of inexpensive studio spaces, elected to stay there. Although the Los Angeles County Museum of Art paid scant attention to anything done after 1950, a few more contemporary galleries had opened, and a California school of art and artists had emerged, with two main branches: Ferus artists such as Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, John Altoon, and Edward Kienholz, who applied Abstract Expressionist paint handling or Rauschenberg-inspired collage to their often scathing interpretations of popular culture; and the so-called “finish fetish” artists, including Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, and Robert Irwin, whose pristine, obsessively worked forms became California’s version of minimalism. Irving Blum, a boundlessly optimistic young entrepreneur who had moved from New York to Los Angeles with the idea of starting an art gallery there, bought out Ed Kienholz’s share in the Ferus Gallery in 1958, and changed its focus, dropping many of the locals (but taking on Ruscha) and bringing in some of New York’s emerging Pop artists. He gave Andy Warhol his first one-man show anywhere, at the Ferus in 1962. A year later, Walter Hopps filled the rapidly modernizing Pasadena Art Museum with works by Marcel Duchamp—his first retrospective. Ruscha saw the show and met Duchamp, whose readymades—common manufactured objects elevated to the status of art by his act of choosing them—had made a big impression on him when he was in art school.

Leo Castelli used to say, in the late sixties, that Los Angeles was poised to rival and maybe surpass New York as the new art mecca, but that didn’t happen. The handful of West Coast collectors whom Hopps, Blum, Nicholas Wilder, and a few other dealers had worked so hard to develop were happy to look at contemporary art in L.A., but they preferred to buy it in New York. Blum had infuriated the Ferus group by showing New York artists at what they considered “their” gallery; he did this to keep the gallery afloat, and because he loved the work, but he could never sell enough of it. The Ferus closed in 1967. Artforum, the authoritative journal that had moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1965, pulled up stakes and moved to New York. Later, so did Blum. Hopps left to work for the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington, D.C. Norton Simon, the California food-services billionaire, took over the financially shaky Pasadena Museum in 1975, deëmphasized its contemporary holdings, and filled the premises with his collection of Impressionists and Old Masters. In torching the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ruscha was a more accurate prophet than Castelli. The fizzling of expectations, though, left many Los Angeles artists with a lingering resentment of New York and New York artists.

Some of the original Ferus people had doubts about Ruscha, who was never really part of their macho, highly contentious fraternity. (Mary Dean, who has been his assistant and studio manager since 1998, told me that she has never seen him lose his temper.) “They thought he was too Pop-oriented,” Blum said. “But then the big paintings started appearing—‘Standard Station,’ and the Twentieth Century Fox one—and they came around.” There were certainly Pop elements in Ruscha’s paintings, along with echoes of Surrealism and Dada, but his work had more in common with the conceptual word games being played by Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, and other language-based artists in New York. Ruscha’s style and subject matter, however, and the deadpan humor with which he deployed them, set him apart from anyone else on either coast. Reviewers had trouble dealing with Ruscha because his work fell into none of the useful categories. It still doesn’t, and this makes him something of a hero to younger artists who use video, film, live performance, photography, social interactions, and any other means at hand—including paint—to expand the definition of art. “Ed never seems to be speaking to grownups,” Adam McEwen, the British-born, New York-based conceptualist, told me recently. “He’s so unpretentious, so un-condescending. He actually does deal with great themes, but in an irreverent way.”

In 1966, Ruscha did a painting called “Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup,” which looked as though he had done exactly that, poured maple syrup on canvas to spell the word “Annie.” It led to a three-year series of immensely skillful trompe-l’oeil word pictures, in which he made oil paint resemble any number of viscous fluids. He also did paintings of bowling balls, olives, marbles, amphetamine pills, and other unrelated items that seemed to hover just above the canvas, and drawings in which three-dimensional words appeared to rise up from the surface like paper cutouts. Some of the drawings were done in graphite and others in gunpowder, a medium that he found easier to control than graphite. “I was just making up these things after frustrations with other ways of painting words,” he said. The frustrations, whatever they were, brought on what seems to have been the only crisis in Ruscha’s professional career. “I can’t bring myself to put paint on canvas,” he told the critic David Bourdon in 1972. “I find no message there anymore.” When I asked Ruscha about this statement, he said, “Well, I don’t have any deep recollections of what I was thinking when I said that. It wasn’t any kind of life factor.” Ruscha, as his mother sometimes pointed out, has always been “a master of evasion.”

He didn’t paint at all in 1970, but he continued to make drawings and prints. He also showed his work in New York for the first time, at the Alexandre Iolas Gallery, and he created a “Chocolate Room” at the 1970 Venice Biennale. Most of the other American artists invited to participate that year decided to boycott the Biennale in protest against the Vietnam War. “I was against the war, but I didn’t see any purpose in the boycott,” Ruscha told me. “I was never an activist in that respect.” A month earlier, in London, he had made a set of prints using “organic substances” (syrup, axle grease, raw egg, beet juice) instead of ink—an experiment that he carried over into many of the paintings he did after his brief falling-out with oil paint. In Venice, he silkscreened Nestlé’s chocolate paste on three hundred and sixty sheets of paper, and used them, shingle style, to cover all four walls of a room. To find the U.S. Pavilion, you could follow your nose.

The Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, does not show modern paintings. It shows photographs, though, and the museum currently has on view a sampling of archival prints from the sixteen photography books that Ruscha published between 1963 and 1972, and film strips from his “Streets of Los Angeles” project, which documents fifty years of what the Getty calls a “deep engagement with Los Angeles’s vernacular architecture and the urban landscape.” This is a lofty description of something that began, somewhat whimsically, with a forty-eight-page, paperbound booklet called “Twentysix Gasoline Stations.”

“I had the title of the book in mind before I even took the photographs,” Ruscha told me, on another chilly day in his Culver City studio. He used to drive back to Oklahoma City five or six times a year, to visit his parents, and the gas stations along Route 66 became, he said, “like a musical rhythm to me—cultural belches in the landscape.” He started photographing them in 1962, with a Yashica twin-lens reflex camera that he had used in his photography classes at Chouinard. He would stop the car, stand beside it, and shoot the filling station from across the road, deliberately avoiding any sort of composition or artful lighting. His snapshot non-style has been compared to the work of Robert Frank, the Swiss photographer whose seminal book, “The Americans,” came out in 1959. Although Ruscha has said that Frank’s work “hit me with a sledgehammer,” he added that it had no direct influence on his gas-station pictures. Ruscha didn’t believe in photography as an art form. He was just getting information and bringing it back, he said, to use in a book. “I just knew I had to make a book of some kind.”

A book of some kind. Not a livre d’artiste, one of those high-quality collaborations between an artist and a fine-art printer, and certainly not a coffee-table buster. What he had in mind was a small, cheap, mass-produced publication that looked like an instruction manual, but with no text. He photographed many more than twenty-six gas stations during his trips to Oklahoma and back, and edited them down to twenty-six. (One became the model for his painting of the Standard Station in Amarillo.) “I like the word ‘gasoline,’ and I like the specific quality of ‘twenty-six,’ ” he explained. Ruscha had spent six months working for a printing firm while he was at Chouinard; he had learned how to set type and to use the photo-offset process, and he published the book himself, in an edition of four hundred copies, priced at three dollars apiece. A few years after the book came out, he realized that it had the “inexplicable thing” that he tries for in a lot of his work—“a kind of ‘huh?’ ” effect. “People would look at it and say, ‘Are you kidding or what? Why are you doing this?’ That’s what I was after—the head-scratching.” In 1970, he brought out a second edition of three thousand copies. The Library of Congress returned the copy Ruscha had sent, with a note saying that it did not wish to add the book to its collections. “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” has become a collector’s item, and a well-preserved, signed first edition can bring as much as twenty-five thousand dollars.

Next up was “Various Small Fires and Milk”—snapshots of people smoking, a Zippo lighter in action, a trash fire, and other mundane conflagrations—and, at the end, a cooling glass of milk. During the next nine years, fourteen more books appeared, among them “Some Los Angeles Apartments,” “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” “Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass,” “Real Estate Opportunities” (vacant lots), and “Royal Road Test”—a photographic record of what happened to Ruscha’s Royal Standard typewriter when Mason Williams threw it out the window of a car that was travelling ninety miles an hour, with Ruscha driving. Compared with his paintings, he said, “The books were easy for me. I didn’t have to struggle, and I felt like I was operating on blind faith more than on any kind of decisions. It was as though somebody else was designing them.” Ruscha’s books can be seen as a triumph of the “huh?” factor. “Wow, all the buildings on Sunset fucking Strip,” John Altoon, the Ferus artist, marvelled. The books’ appeal to other artists has been cumulative and worldwide. A recent exhibition that Bob Monk put together at the Gagosian Gallery featured self-published books in response to Ruscha by more than a hundred artists in the United States, Europe, Russia, and Japan, some done as recently as last year. Among the titles were “None of the Buildings on the Sunset Strip,” “Fiftytwo Shopping Trolleys,” “Every coffee I drank in January 2010,” “Eminent Erections,” “Vingt-Six Stations Service,” and “73 Häuser von Sinemoretz.”

As a boy in Oklahoma City, delivering newspapers on his bike every morning, Ruscha had thought about making a detailed model that showed all the houses along his route, something he “could study like an architect standing over a table and plotting a city.” He never did it, but the memory led to his Sunset Strip book. To photograph the approximately two-mile strip of Sunset Boulevard, Ruscha stood in the back of a pickup truck while a friend drove. They did it early in the morning, when there were no pedestrians and almost no traffic. Ruscha shot both sides of the street, and in the book the pages are joined to form an accordion-pleated panorama that unfolds to twenty-seven feet. In 1965, he photographed the entire twenty-two miles of Sunset Boulevard, which runs from downtown L.A., through Hollywood and Bel Air and Beverly Hills, to the Pacific Ocean.

“My intention was not to have a goal in mind, but just to record a street in a very faithful way,” he said. “Sometimes there are no storefronts and it’s just land, and I photograph that, too.” Ruscha was speaking in the present tense because he and his team, which includes Gary Regester, a professional photographer who is based in Colorado, and Paul Ruscha, re-photograph Sunset Boulevard every three years or so. Paul, who has worked for his brother since 1973, photographs and documents every piece of art Ruscha makes. After their father died, in 1959, he told me, “Ed became my dad, and he still is.” In addition to Sunset, they have photographed Sepulveda, which is more than forty miles long, Melrose, Hollywood Boulevard, La Cienega, and a number of other arteries, including the Pacific Coast Highway. Until the current Getty exhibition, Ruscha had never shown any of this material. Two years ago, the entire backlog—hundreds of reels of still photographs, plus a few experiments with film and video—was acquired by the Getty Research Center, which has the facilities to archive and preserve it, including the updates he keeps sending. Nobody seems to know whether the vast project is an art work or a form of urban documentation, but the general feeling is that it is both.

Ruscha and I spent a day driving around Los Angeles. The weather had turned warm again, and before we set off he showed me his garden, behind the studio. It is more like a small orchard. “Blood oranges and grapefruits right here, and some mandarin tangerines, and three avocados over there,” he said. “Lemon, kumquat, pomegranate, figs, cauliflower, lettuce, peppers, and looks like I also have a gopher.” He pointed to a hole, and then to a withered stalk a few feet away. “That was the world’s hottest pepper, called bhut jolokia, but it died.” When one of the plants dies, he scratches its name and dates on a metal disk and adds it to others on a wood plank that he keeps in the studio. Near the garden is an outdoor painting studio, and a parking space for his 2000 black Lexus and a couple of antique cars he’s reconditioned—a 1939 Ford and a 1933 Ford pickup. We got into the Lexus, and turned left onto Jefferson Boulevard.

Ruscha drives smoothly, both hands on the wheel, window open. We passed several boxlike warehouse buildings that looked like the ones in the “Course of Empire” paintings that he did in 2005. A little farther, he motioned toward a building on the left, and said he used to do freelance work there in the nineteen-sixties, for an outfit called Sunset House. He was becoming known as an artist by then, but he wasn’t earning much money, so for two weeks before Christmas he would hand-letter names on porcelain frogs and other gift items, including a receptacle for dentures called Ma and Pa Chopper Hopper. When we got to Western Avenue, in East Hollywood, he pointed out a low building where he’d had his studio for more than twenty years. “I would look out my window there, and if I could see the Hollywood sign I’d know the weather wasn’t too smoggy,” he said. The sign first appeared in Ruscha’s work in 1968, in an eight-color screen print. He painted it in 1977, from behind, so that the letters are reversed, and silhouetted against one of the lurid sunsets that L.A. used to have, in the years when the smog was especially bad. Ruscha had returned to oil paint by this time, but he soon shifted to acrylics for the long, narrow landscapes-with-words that he was doing then. The format made you think of CinemaScope.

The words on his new paintings were phrases and sentences, which rarely had a discernible connection to the image: “Thermometers Should Last Forever”; “That Was Then This Is Now”; “Honey . . . I Twisted Through More Damn Traffic to Get Here.” Some of the landscapes were more than thirteen feet long—he called them “grand horizontals,” the French term for top-of-the-line courtesans, and the words on several of these do suggest male-female relationships. Although Ruscha doesn’t paint people, they make their presence felt through language. He uses things that he’s overheard people say, or that he’s picked up from popular songs, the radio, or the movies. “Brave Men Run in My Family,” which appears as both image and title in several pictures, was a Bob Hope line in “The Paleface.”

We drove through other neighborhoods where he had lived or once had studios—Echo Park, Laurel Canyon, Silver Lake. “It was a different city then,” he said. “Slower. The most important changes I see are these old neighborhoods that are gradually crumbling. Every time they tear down a bungalow-style house, they replace it with a three-story box for twelve families. They’re like instant slums. Nevertheless, I like everything here. In some ways, the attraction is invisible. You can’t think of one thing to explain it.” In 1966, he had said to an interviewer, “Being in Los Angeles has had little or no effect on my work. I could have done it anywhere,” but he doesn’t say that anymore.

After driving for four hours, with a pause for lunch at Lucy’s El Adobe Café, and a detour to see the house where the Black Dahlia murderer was supposed to have lived, and a longer detour to search for and find a hilltop property once owned by George Herriman, whose “Krazy Kat” comics Ruscha had loved when he was growing up, we went back to Culver City and looked at photographs of the small, concrete-block house that Ruscha has owned for forty years in the California High Desert, near Joshua Tree National Monument. He designed it himself, with blueprints provided by his friend Frank Gehry in 1976. “Danna doesn’t go anymore,” he said. “It’s pretty remote—a three-hour drive, and the only other house out there is a mile away.” The property has an outdoor painting studio, a wind-powered generator, solar panels for heating, and plenty of wildlife, including rattlesnakes. Ruscha tries to go there every week, alone, for two or three days; he paints, takes long walks, watches baseball on TV (the Dodgers or the Red Sox), does maintenance work on the house, and reads. When I was in L.A., he was halfway through “Moby-Dick,” but he also reads a lot of nonfiction, mainly history and science. “I have periods when I feel frustrated living in Los Angeles, when the traffic bothers me and I hate the place,” he said. “But then I feel differently and I want to come back.”

Ruscha had his first retrospective in 1982, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. On the cover of the exhibition catalogue was his 1979 word drawing “I Don’t Want No Retro Spective.” He was forty-five years old, and critics still couldn’t define what he did. In the catalogue, the writer Dave Hickey complained about the difficulty of summing up “a body of critical opinion which no one had been so bold as to venture.” The exhibition travelled to four other museums, including the Whitney and LACMA, and the reviews were generally favorable but noncommittal. Writing in the Village Voice, Roberta Smith found the show “an inspiring example of what it means for an artist to be original in a very specific, even limited way, and to be so true to his originality that he is able to try something of everything.” At that time, Ruscha was the only Los Angeles artist represented by Leo Castelli, the most powerful name in contemporary art, but even there his status was unclear. He lived in California, and his work could make you laugh, and for some New York artists and critics that meant you didn’t take it seriously. “I had no illusions about my position in the art world or at the Castelli gallery,” Ruscha told me. “I didn’t feel like one of his leading artists, but that didn’t bother me, because I could actually make a living from the stipend he was giving me.”

Castelli priced Ruscha’s paintings between three and four thousand dollars, a lot less than Jasper Johns was getting, but considerably more than Ruscha had earned before joining the gallery. After the retrospective, his prices went up, and his work gradually found a larger audience. In 1985, he was commissioned to do a series of murals for the Miami-Dade Public Library, in Florida. He needed more space, so he moved from Western Avenue to a bigger studio on Electric Avenue, in Venice, and began working on a larger scale. He did a series of “City Lights” pictures, which looked like nocturnal views of Los Angeles from above, with words overlaid in white paint. In many Ruscha pictures, you are looking down on something—an oblique viewpoint he has favored ever since he saw, on his first trip abroad, John Everett Millais’s painting of the drowned Ophelia at the Tate, in London. Paul Ruscha gave him a reproduction of this picture, and it rests on an easel in the studio—a talisman of Victorian sentiment, and one of the few examples of older art that Ruscha cites, without irony, as an influence. For his next series, of very large, dark “silhouette” paintings in black-and-white, he used an airbrush to depict blurry images that echoed earlier times—a bison, a wagon train, a four-masted galleon. In the late nineteen-eighties, his work caught on with the new Japanese collectors whose avidity for contemporary Western art was driving auction prices to record highs. “That’s me, the twenty-five-year overnight sensation,” Ruscha joked. The worldwide recession in 1990 scared off the Japanese, and put an end to the eighties art boom. Ruscha’s prices slumped, and stayed down for the next dozen years.

Only in the past decade has he come to be looked upon, in New York and everywhere else, as a major artist. Since 1997, when Castelli retired, Ruscha has shown with Larry Gagosian, whose international network of thirteen galleries has apparently become an art empire too big to fail. Gagosian is Rome to Castelli’s Greece, and his most successful artists have proved impervious to the economic recession. Ruscha’s 1965-66 “Burning Gas Station” sold at Christie’s, in 2007, for just under seven million dollars, and the immense and startlingly kitsch “mountain paintings” that he has been doing since 1997 bring considerably more than a million dollars on the primary market. He borrows his snowcapped mountain landscapes from magazine illustrations or photographs, and uses them as “anonymous backdrops for words.” As he explained to me, “I’m not really painting mountains, but an idea of mountains. Maybe I faltered and started thinking it was acceptable to do a postcard-pretty picture.” We can assume that at some level he is also sending up the nineteenth-century tradition of nature as the American Sublime. His mountains are scenarios for word frolics, like “Tulsa Slut,” “Uh Oh,” and “Pay Nothing Until April.”

The ten large paintings in Ruscha’s “Course of Empire” suite, which premièred at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and came to the Whitney Museum a few months later, introduced a new and surprising element in his work, which looks suspiciously like social commentary. They were inspired by Thomas Cole’s allegorical cycle (1833-36) showing the birth, flowering, decline, and destruction of an imaginary city. Ruscha’s cool, minimalist treatment of the theme is quieter but more devastating. He took five of the black-and-white “Blue Collar” paintings of industrial sites that he had done in 1992—factories, a trade school, an isolated outdoor telephone booth—and painted five new ones of the same sites, in color, altered by time, circumstance, and his imagination. The trade school is shuttered, the telephone booth is gone, the “Tool and Die” insignia on a factory has given way to lettering in an indecipherable Asian language. A message is being delivered, and it’s hard not to think that it has to do with American decline. Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator, cautioned me against specific readings. “I would never say Ed’s work is ‘about’ something,” she said. “The genius of it is that he takes something incredibly familiar and gives it this level of ambiguity.” Ruscha was gently dismissive when I brought up the subject of national decline. He said, “From the beginning, I’ve felt like America is the place where all this throbbing stuff is happening. I don’t see the American life style or American influence waning at all.” Ambiguity, De Salvo suggests, is his default mode. The (wordless) “Psycho-Spaghetti Western” paintings he showed at Gagosian in 2011 are gorgeous scenarios of waste and destruction—pileups of old mattresses, used lumber, shredded truck tires, and other debris, on desolate landscapes that run uphill on the familiar Ruscha diagonal.

Ruscha’s ascent to the upper echelons of art-world esteem has coincided with recurring assurances that Los Angeles is, once again, on the verge of becoming a major art center. Some people believe this has already happened. A great many internationally known artists now live in Los Angeles, including Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy, Chris Burden, Laura Owens, and Ryan Trecartin, and more and more artists are finding that L.A.’s relatively low rents, proliferating galleries, and unstressed openness to new ideas make it a viable alternative to New York. Three museums engage actively in contemporary art: LACMA, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, or MOCA, which opened in 1983 and mobilized big-time support from artists (who gave important works) and billionaire collectors, such as Eli Broad and the late Marcia Weisman, Norton Simon’s sister. MOCA eventually built a collection of post-1940 art that comes close to rivalling that of the Museum of Modern Art, and some of its thematic exhibitions have been bolder and more illuminating than anything being done in New York.

Support for contemporary art here is neither wide nor deep, however, as MOCA’s recent near-death experience makes clear. Having depleted its endowment from nearly forty million dollars in 2000 to five million in 2008, the museum’s board of trustees set off a tsunami of criticism last summer by parting company with their longtime chief curator, Paul Schimmel. All four of the artist-trustees, including Ruscha and Baldessari, quit the board in protest. “A lot of artists felt, man, MOCA is dead,” Ruscha told me. “The artists were not shaping its future anymore.” Proposals were floated for MOCA to merge or form a partnership with LACMA or the University of Southern California, but the threat of such dire measures quickly receded. Jeffrey Deitch, the former New York gallery owner who became MOCA’s director in 2010, has doubled attendance with several highly popular shows (“Art in the Streets,” “Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles”), and he and the board have solicited commitments for a large chunk of the hundred million dollars needed to rebuild the endowment. Schimmel, meanwhile, has become a partner in the internationally powerful Swiss gallery Hauser & Wirth, which will open a Los Angeles branch—called Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel—in 2015.

Like most successful artists, Ruscha would love to have a career-capping museum exhibition in New York. He has had discussions with the Metropolitan Museum (which did a Baldessari retrospective in 2010), and both the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney are said to be interested. Never much of a self-promoter, Ruscha is content to wait, and to continue doing whatever interests him. Last year, he was asked to put together an exhibition composed of works in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, in Vienna, whose collection stops at circa 1800. He got permission to bring in some material from the natural-history museum across the street, and when I was in his studio he showed me photographs of his finds—kidney stones (called “bezoars”) from ancient animals, a multipurpose knife made in 1610, a slab of bright-blue argonite—to go with the paintings and the drawings he selected by Brueghel, Bosch, Rubens, Arcimboldo, and other Old Masters.

“Bosch and Brueghel were ahead of their time,” he said. “They were fighting against enormous odds to make statements that might be seen as sinful. Looking at their pictures, I see these brown and red tones that seem to evoke history and madness at the same time, and I want to commend them for taking this plunge into madness. I think every artist wants to make a picture that opens the gates to Heaven.” Ruscha’s title for the Vienna show comes from a line in Mark Twain’s autobiography: “The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas.” ♦

SHOUTS & MURMURS
Separation-Anxiety Sleepaway Camp

by Jesse Eisenberg

8 A.M.—Campers begin the day with an early call to Mom. Those campers who have wet the bed will have an opportunity to change clothes, or, if they prefer, they can remain in their soiled pajamas, as this may be comforting and remind them of home.

9 A.M.—Breakfast is served in the main dining hall, though most campers will choose not to eat, because the orange juice here is not fresh-squeezed like Mom makes and this will freak them out. Those campers who boldly choose to eat will be given pancakes shaped like the first letters of their names, which will remind them of home and likely cause indigestion.

10:30 A.M.—Swim time. Campers will swim for seven minutes in a shallow wading pool, with two lifeguards per camper. Campers will wear pre-inflated floaties on their arms and legs and around their necks. After swimming, each camper will have an opportunity to call his mom to let her know that he has not drowned. If the camper has drowned, his mother will be notified by one of the camp’s Counsellors in Training, or C.I.T.s. The C.I.T.s will then have an opportunity to call their own mothers.

Noon—Lunchtime. Campers dig into the lunches that their mothers have meticulously prepared and FedExed overnight. Campers are encouraged not to read the enclosed notes until after their food is digested, which will be difficult, as the thought of the unread note just sitting there in the bag will be unsettling.

After lunch, campers have a twenty-minute reading period, in which they may read their notes from Mom. If a camper has not received a note from Mom, one of the Counsellors in Training, or C.I.T.s, will forge a note and pretend that it was lost in the refrigerator where the campers’ lunches were stored. C.I.T.s will make sincere attempts to match Mom’s handwriting, although complete accuracy cannot be guaranteed.

2-3 P.M.—Campers will be given a free period of one hour to explore the campgrounds, kayak on nearby Lake Winooski, build a campfire, or write postcards to their moms. Telephone calls to Mom are also possible during this time.

4 P.M.—We follow free period with an afternoon call to Mom. At this point, campers may also ask to speak to their fathers, but this is strictly optional. Most likely, Dad will not have time for the camper, or, if he does, he will probably just talk about how stressful work is or how well the camper’s sister is doing at her sports camp. If Dad does get on the phone during this period, the camper will be allotted twenty additional minutes to debrief with Mom. Tissues provided.

5:30 P.M.—Campers may choose from a variety of electives, including Show and Tell, where they can present a relic from home to their fellow-campers, who probably will not be able to focus on something from someone else’s life, since this requires a level of interest in others that campers do not possess during periods of great agitation.

We are featuring a new elective this year, called Lamentation Period, in which campers may reflect privately on their relationship with their mothers and ponder the futility of life away from home. Fears about college can also be contemplated during this time.

7 P.M.—Dinner is served in the main dining hall. Though it is optional, campers may enjoy themselves briefly and, if desired, experience the slightest amount of relief that they are a few hours closer to going home than they were at breakfast.

9 P.M.—Lights-out—unless a camper would like to stay up all night and call his mom. If the camper chooses to sleep, but then has a nightmare, a call to Mom is allowed and even encouraged. If the camper chooses to sleep, but wakes up before his bunkmates, the camper may call his mother. If the camper chooses to sleep and makes it through the whole night without a call to Mom, he will be escorted home by one of the Counsellors in Training, or C.I.T.s, to apologize to his mom for being aloof.

Note: Counsellors in Training are drawn from a pool of campers’ moms. ♦

BOOKS
Prison of the Mind

A Chinese poet’s memoir of incarceration.

by Ian Buruma

Spending time in jail is no fun anywhere, but each society has its own cultural refinements of misery. The sadistic imagination of Chinese prison authorities, though hardly unique, is often remarkable. But so is that of the inmates themselves, who form their own hierarchies, their own prisons within prisons.

At the Chongqing Municipal Public Security Bureau Investigation Center, for example, also known as the Song Mountain Investigation Center, the cell bosses devised an exotic menu of torments. A few samples:

SICHUAN-STYLE SMOKED DUCK: The enforcer burns the inmate’s pubic hair, pulls back his foreskin and blackens the head of the penis with fire.

Or:

NOODLES IN A CLEAR BROTH: Strings of toilet papers are soaked in a bowl of urine, and the inmate is forced to eat the toilet paper and drink the urine.

Or:

TURTLE SHELL AND PORK SKIN SOUP: The enforcer smacks the inmate’s knee caps until they are bruised and swollen like turtle shells. Walking is impossible.

There are other tortures, too, meted out in a more improvised manner. Liao Yiwu, in his extraordinary prison memoir, “For a Song and a Hundred Songs” (translated from the Chinese by Wenguang Huang; New Harvest), describes the case of a schizophrenic woodcutter who had axed his own wife, because she was so emaciated that he took her for a bundle of wood. The cell boss spikes the woodcutter’s broth with a laxative, and then refuses to let him use the communal toilet bucket, with the result that the desperate man shits all over a fellow-inmate. As a punishment for this disgusting transgression, his face is smashed into a basin. The guards, assuming that he has tried to commit suicide, a prison offense, then work him over with a stun baton.

Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 to study the country’s prison system, and ended up writing “Democracy in America.” Observing the Chinese prison system from the inside, from 1990 to 1994, as a “counterrevolutionary” inmate, Liao Yiwu tells us a great deal about Chinese society, both traditional and Communist, including the impact of revolutionary rhetoric, forced denunciations and public confessions, and, as times have changed since Mao’s misrule, criminal forms of capitalism. He ends his account by saying that “China remains a prison of the mind: prosperity without liberty.”

Liao was incarcerated for writing a poem, “Massacre”—a long stream-of-consciousness memorial to the thousands of people who were killed on June 4, 1989, when the pro-democracy movement was crushed throughout China. The poem, in its English translation by Michael Day, begins as follows:

And another sort of massacre takes place at utopia’s core

The Prime Minister catches cold, the people must cough; martial law declared

again and again.

The toothless machinery of the state rolls towards those who have the courage to

resist the sickness.

Liao was not a political activist, or, strictly speaking, a dissident, and his resistance had a spontaneous quality. Politics didn’t interest him much, even during the nineteen-eighties, when many young Chinese thought of little else. He led a rather dissolute life, wandering from place to place as a “well-dressed hypocrite, a poet who portrayed himself as a positive role model but all the while breathed in women like I was breathing air, seeking shelter and warmth in random sex.”

Like many Chinese who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, Liao was more or less self-educated in literature, although he received a grounding in the Chinese classics from his father, a schoolteacher. His memoir is sprinkled with the names of Western writers—Orwell, Kundera, Proust—some of whose works penetrated even the prison walls in Chongqing. Among them, amazingly, was Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” In Liao’s words, “On the page was an imaginary prison, while all around me was the real thing.”

Unlike his friend Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Prize-winning critic and a writer with strong political convictions, Liao never wished to stick his neck out. He describes himself as an artist who simply wanted to be free to write in any way he liked. As recently as 2011, he told the journalist Ian Johnson, “I don’t want to break their laws. I am not interested in them and wish they weren’t interested in me.” But, in 1989, he put himself “on a self-destructive path” by performing his poem in bars and dance clubs, howling and chanting in the traditional manner of Chinese mourning. A recording of the poem was distributed informally, and a film, entitled “Requiem,” was made of his recitation by a group of sympathetic artists and friends. None, according to Liao, could be classified as “dissidents” or “democracy fighters.” But they were all arrested, their work confiscated, and thus “the Public Security Bureau destroyed a vibrant underground literary community in Sichuan.”

Liao’s time in prison didn’t turn him into an activist, either. He was approached at one point by a fellow-“89er,” who planned to start an organization of political prisoners. Liao refused to take part, and explained the reason for his having written “Massacre” in the first place. He “was compelled to protest,” he said, because “the state ideology conflicted violently with the poet’s right of free expression.” To this, he added in his memoir, “I never intended to be a hero, but in a country where insanity ruled, I had to take a stand. ‘Massacre’ was my art and my art was my protest.”

Several famous dissidents have written vividly about their prison experiences. Wei Jingsheng’s “The Courage to Stand Alone” is an account of eighteen years spent in prisons after he helped lead the Democracy Wall movement, in the nineteen-seventies. Harry Wu’s “Bitter Winds” describes his ordeal in forced-labor camps in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Their heroic stories bear a strong political message of standing up to dictatorship. Liao is a literary man, and this actually makes his prison memoir even more compelling. For one thing, he is ruthlessly candid about his weaknesses, and his fears. There is nothing especially heroic about him. Watching the guards in combat training on his first day in prison, he “shuddered like a nervous rat.” Forced to sing songs over and over again with a parched throat in the freezing cold to entertain the guards, he is beaten with an electric baton. When he cannot go on any longer, he is stripped and wrestled to the ground: “I could feel the baton on my butthole, but I refused to surrender. The tip of the baton entered me. I screamed and then whimpered in pain like a dog.” Liao tried to commit suicide twice, once by bashing his head against the wall. This elicited ridicule from his cellmates, who accused him of playacting, something they thought typical of a bookish poet. If he had really wanted to smash his skull, he should have made sure to use the wall edge.

Liao describes very precisely what it is like to be in constant fear, to live in a cramped cell with so many other men that there is barely room to lie down, and to be starved of proper food, and sex. One ravenous inmate caught a rat, skinned it alive, and ate it raw. Another stuffed his mouth from a bucket of slop. Sex goes on, but in a debased form. A prisoner almost burned his bed down by masturbating to a cigarette lighter that, when lit, showed a picture of a naked woman. And one man got carried away with lust at the sight of a soap-opera star on TV. Liao saw men crowd around a window, the cell boss hoisted onto the shoulders of his slaves, as they jacked off while trying to catch a glimpse of a female outside. A young man was raped by the cell boss, fell in love with him, and was dismissed with a smack in the face when the boss became impotent.

One of the less creditable reasons we read prison memoirs such as this one with horrified fascination is that the torments of others can have a lurid pornographic appeal. But what makes Liao’s work so riveting is his gift for observation. Despite his own suffering, he is endlessly curious about others, their characters, their stories, and how they cope with the terrors of prison life. His encounters with other prisoners are skillfully transformed into short stories. Since some of these men are facing execution, the stories are often about dealing with imminent death. A heroin smuggler nicknamed Dead Chang wants to borrow Liao’s atlas in preparation for his next life as a wandering ghost. Dead Chang got lost too many times in his present life, and wishes to visit his favorite haunts after he is dispatched with a bullet to the neck. Being told by this condemned man that they might meet again in the next world, Liao finds that his “limbs were quivering.” Dead Chang asks him whether he is O.K., and “let out a sinister laugh. The deep crease between his eyebrows seemed to have opened up like a mouth, ready to swallow me.”

Some of the prisoners were featured in another remarkable book by Liao, first published in Taiwan as “Interviews with People from the Bottom Rungs of Society” (2001), and in the U.S. as “The Corpse Walker” (2008). Among them is an illiterate peasant who declared his native village to be an independent monarchy, with himself as the emperor. For this act of counterrevolutionary subversion, he was locked up for life. What fascinates Liao about this “peasant emperor” is that his fantasies are derived from Chinese classics. One of his claims is that a yellow ribbon bearing his imperial name was discovered inside a fish. When Liao points out that this ruse was used by a peasant rebel two thousand years ago to trick people into following him, the emperor tells him to shut up: “It’s awfully rude of you to talk to Your Majesty this way. Your Majesty knows that you are a journalist in disguise and have been sent from the hostile kingdom of China. You have attempted to conspire with the prison authorities to lure me into giving you incriminating evidence.”

Literature can serve as an escape, as when Liao drifts into memories of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” He identifies in particular with one of the characters, Colonel Buendia, who loses his mind after being tied to a chestnut tree for many years. Like the Colonel, Liao retreats into his own mind. At other times, literary works illustrate the most primitive aspects of prison existence. Liao recalls Milan Kundera’s definition, in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” of totalitarian kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit.” Liao writes that he cannot raise human feces to a higher level of metaphor: “In this ordinary memoir of mine, shit is shit. I keep mentioning it because I almost drowned in it.” This is quite literally true; as a newcomer in a cell, or if he had lost favor with one of the cell bosses, he would have to sleep with his face next to the toilet bucket.

And yet he can’t resist using shit metaphorically, as in his statement that he is living “in the shitty pigsty called China.” Sickness, too, is elevated to metaphor: “If China were a patient suffering from colon cancer, the city of Chongqing would be the filthy terminus of the colon, a diseased anus.” Prison is frequently described in his book as a prison within the giant prison of a diseased Chinese society, a grotesque mirror of the political institutions and rhetoric of the People’s Republic of China.

The language of Maoism, now almost as ingrained in Chinese life as Confucian maxims once were, and often used in a similar way, crops up again and again in prison conversations. Inmates sometimes use Mao’s dictums sarcastically, as when the unfortunate woodcutter, after having imbibed the laxative, is prevented from getting to the toilet bucket: “Without discipline and rules,” they taunt him, “revolution will not succeed.” Sometimes Mao is quoted in earnest. A cell boss who is sympathetic to Liao warns him against cultivating the friendship of a fellow-intellectual: “Don’t be too bookish. . . . Remember what Chairman Mao said about class struggles—never let your guard down against your class enemy.”

Quite apart from Maoist sentiments, it is the Chinese system of government that is replicated inside the prison. This owes something to Leninist Party organization, but a great deal to more traditional practices as well. When Liao first enters the Song Mountain Investigation Center, his cell boss explains how things work. He likens the cell hierarchy to the Politburo and the Central Military Commission, whose members are above the common people. They can do anything they please. But, to maintain order, they must impose absolute unity in the cell. The first sign of rebellion will be crushed without mercy. However, the boss says, echoing centuries of Confucian doctrine, the rulers cannot be too harsh: “We need to let the people beneath us feel that we are like their parents.” When Liao objects, quoting Chairman Mao’s saying that the people are the parents of the Party, the boss shows a better understanding of Chinese reality: “That’s goddamned nonsense! If a thief here wishes to have a nice filling meal, it’s up to me to decide.”

Not surprisingly, the prison authorities also model their methods on common practices in the People’s Republic. The use of political campaigns, for example. Inmates at the Investigation Center were forced to take part in an annual campaign called “Confess Your Own Crimes and Report on Others.” Formal rallies were held in the courtyard, just as in Maoist times, with much chanting of political slogans and long speeches made by police and prison officials. Many hours were devoted to writing confessions and denunciations. Cell bosses were encouraged to pick the juiciest items from their menu of torments for those whose keenness to confess or tell on others was judged to be inadequate.

This tactic, too, is a toxic combination of tradition and modern innovation. Ritual confession was always part of Confucian justice. Being forced to report on others, though hardly unknown in the past, is a totalitarian refinement designed to break all trust among people, so that their only loyalty will be to the Party. Liao writes that confess-and-report campaigns were so rough that several people died under torture. When things threatened to get seriously out of hand, however, the authorities would call a halt to the proceedings, and, in the usual Maoist fashion, turn the tables on the perpetrators by starting another campaign, this time one called “Crack Down on Prison Bullies.” The very people who had been encouraged to “break” recalcitrant prisoners were now broken in turn.

But, of course, China has moved on since Mao’s decades of terror. When Liao was in prison, China’s door had already been open to business with the capitalist world for more than ten years. Economic reforms began in the early nineteen-eighties, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. In 1992, Deng called for even faster economic growth. As a result, in Liao’s words, “prison personnel never missed a beat and were quick to take advantage of the free labor to fatten their wallets.”

Free labor is a polite phrase for slavery. Each prisoner was required to spend at least ten hours a day putting together medicine packets, while being subjected to political exhortations from loudspeakers—the usual Chinese Communist mixture of ideological bullying and economic exploitation. Liao remarks that this type of repetitive manual work had already been abandoned by local factories. But prison authorities could make tidy profits by whipping the incarcerated slaves into reaching quotas of up to three thousand packets a day. Inmates who tried to escape or who resisted the prison regimen would be beaten up or thrown into “dark cells” that were just big enough to crawl into and lie down. “After a year or so,” Liao writes, “the dark-cell-dweller’s skin turned pale, his bones fragile, and his hair white as frost. The skin became so transparent that one could see the blue veins.”

Liao mentions a few moments of respite. There were instances of kindness from cell bosses who favored him, sometimes for being a poet; respect for the written word is not dead in China. A Buddhist monk taught him to play the flute. And, once in a while, conditions improved a little because of foreign pressure on China to do better on human rights. This should make those of us who had given up all hope of influencing official Chinese behavior from the outside a little less cynical.

Meanwhile, Liao tried to keep his memories of what he had heard and seen in prison by scribbling tiny notes in a copy of the classic Chinese novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” On January 31, 1994, he was freed. But, in his account, his release was only the beginning of a different type of ordeal, perhaps more bitter in its way. Troublemakers and dissidents are rarely popular in oppressive societies. They cause problems for others by provoking reprisals, and they make the majority of people who refuse to rebel feel uneasy about their conformity. Liao dreaded going home for the New Year and other family celebrations, because he knew that he would be criticized. His wife decided to divorce him—perhaps not surprising, as Liao never claims to have been a devoted husband. Worse was his abandonment by old friends. After four years of jail, he writes, “I was no more than a pile of dog shit to my fellow writers.” This rejection might suggest a peculiarly Chinese form of callousness, but it actually has more to do with how China is now run. After the failed rebellion of 1989, the Communist government made a clever deal with the educated classes: if members of the urban élite would stay out of politics, they would have the freedom to enrich themselves. “Our whole country was suddenly busy making money, which was a corrosive acid that dissolved political dissent,” Liao writes. “The same people who used to march fearlessly in the street for democracy now have become ‘apolitical’ in the current era of rampant materialism—Communist style.” Several of his former artistic comrades had become businessmen.

In such circumstances, the normal human tendency to shun troublemakers is strengthened by the irrepressible consciousness of having made a shabby deal. Liao’s keenest readers, as is so often the case with people living under dictatorship, were the officials who were paid to censor his words. Reduced to life as an educated vagabond, sometimes playing his flute in the streets to survive, and terrified of being sent to jail again, Liao managed to cross the border into Vietnam; from there, he made his way to Germany, where he now lives. And so it is that this immensely gifted Chinese writer performs his poetic acts of mourning for the entertainment of audiences in Berlin and New York—an exotic “dissident” abroad, his voice to be heard everywhere except where it is most needed. ♦

BRIEFLY NOTED
Daily Rituals

by Mason Currey (Knopf)

This collection of short essays tells us how famous creative people got themselves to the desk. Currey assumes that they followed the same routine all their lives, but never mind: the limitation makes for good stories. A lot of writers, like automobile assemblers, worked on minimums, the most famous being Trollope’s twenty-five hundred words each morning, before going to his day job. (Yeats said that he never got more than five or six good lines in a day.) Joyce could write with his family hollering around him; most writers can’t bear noise. Mark Twain’s family never dared knock on the door of his study. If they absolutely needed him, they blew a horn. Many artists took huge amounts of stimulants. Sartre reportedly consumed about twenty amphetamine tablets daily. This—plus the fact that Simone de Beauvoir did much of his writing for him—no doubt contributed to his view that you didn’t need to spend a lot of time with pen in hand. By contrast, V. S. Pritchett said that the really great artists “never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.” ♦

BRIEFLY NOTED
The Still Point of the Turning World

by Emily Rapp (Penguin Press)

On the first page of this memoir, we learn that Rapp’s son, Ronan, has been given a diagnosis of Tay-Sachs, a fatal progressive disease. As Ronan’s body fails him, Rapp tries to make sense of what is happening. Her bookshelf offers comfort, and she quotes liberally from favorite works that seem to be on hand just as she needs them: C. S. Lewis, Kobayashi Issa, Mary Shelley. Rapp never seems able to convince herself or her readers that there is any sort of thesis to be gleaned from the book, but makes no excuses or apologies, reflecting that “writing would not save Ronan. But, I thought, it might save me.” When she asks, “What can be learned from a dying baby?,” the question contains a kind of shudder at the idea that one might try to find any coherent meaning in the experience of watching a child fade. ♦

BRIEFLY NOTED
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

by Anthony Marra (Hogarth)

This début novel, set mostly in 2004, during the second Chechen war, revolves around a village doctor’s attempt to protect a child after her father is abducted by Russian soldiers. He takes her to a nearly abandoned hospital, where she is reluctantly cared for by Sonja, a doctor who is struggling to deal with the ambiguous fate of her sister, a heroin addict. Marra is a brisk and able storyteller, and he moves deftly between a number of characters who are drawn into contact by the war. The plot at times verges on melodrama, and characters have a propensity to spout expository history and aphoristic wisdom. But the writing is vivid throughout. One memorable scene describes the doctor’s first amputation, in which “his quick hard saw-strokes spat into the air a fine white bone dust that drifted toward him, drawn by his breath, eventually dissolving into his damp surgical mask.” ♦

BRIEFLY NOTED
Our Man in Iraq

by Robert Perisic, translated from the Croatian by Will Firth (Black Balloon)

This novel follows a disaffected journalist living in Zagreb, whose life crumbles when his cousin, a reporter in the Iraq War, disappears. Perisic depicts, with acerbic wit, a class of urban élites who are trying to reconcile their nineties rebellion with the reality of present-day Croatia, and chronicles the aftershock of Croatia’s postwar “cataclysmic system change,” which ushered in capitalism and democracy. The characters’ snide remarks could easily sound cynical, but the novel has a levity informed by the sense of social fluidity that comes with democracy. “No one is obliged to inherit an identity now,” whereas before “there were times when you were born a serf and died a serf.” ♦

POP MUSIC
Hard Rock Revival

Queens of the Stone Age reinvent the form.

by Sasha Frere-Jones

Hard rock is not what springs to mind when you think of oppressed groups, but throughout its history, despite its popularity, it has received a great deal of dismissive criticism, and today there is not much of a hard-rock scene left. Queens of the Stone Age’s near-perfect new album, “. . . Like Clockwork,” an excellent example of the form, débuted at No. 1 in early June, but it arrives accompanied by no wave of critical attention or trend pieces. The band is on the indie label Matador, after almost ten years on Interscope. Maybe they need no cohort now.

Queens of the Stone Age are led by a six-foot-four autodidact named Josh Homme (rhymes with “mommy”), who was raised in the California desert. He recently turned forty, and has been in professional rock bands since he was fourteen. Homme’s first well-known band, Kyuss (named after a character from Dungeons & Dragons), played slower, menacing music, which was often called stoner rock. It was a defiantly odd sound, and though Kyuss was on a major label in the mid-nineties, it never achieved mainstream popularity. The band would have more friends today. Acts like Sleep and Sunn O))) have made long stretches of low, sustained, amplified guitar more common, and achieved critical respect. It’s an interesting irony: vibrant and accessible rock, such as Homme plays today, is now stranger than hour-long drones.

In the early and mid-seventies, the heyday of hard rock, only a curmudgeon would have denied himself the pleasure of Cheap Trick and Aerosmith, bands that acted like dumb hedonists but were clever and meticulous when making records, a balance that Homme has emulated. Hooks were laid end to end; guitars were played at high volume without becoming overbearingly fuzzy or indistinct; and there was a sense of humor about the entire affair. Then, in the late seventies, the advent of punk and its offshoots complicated everything. In a rejection of meticulous professionalism, amateurism was in, which was not helpful for bands that prided themselves on accurate playing, singing in tune, and making records sound huge with studio tricks, a technique that Queens of the Stone Age have mastered. The longhairs and the decadents were out—this was a party purge, in every sense. Big guitars and hooks snuck into the eighties only as guilty pleasures, before Guns N’ Roses brought back some of hard rock’s legitimacy. (Heavy metal, a separate category, is the water bug of the story; catchy hits were never oxygen to this life-form.)

Nirvana at once perfected and ruined everything. In 1991, the band released “Nevermind,” one of the four or five perfect hard-rock records. It was explicitly indebted to my favorite Aerosmith album, “Rocks,” and it quickly became a mainstream hit. Because Nirvana’s members, besides being newly minted rock stars, were also politically aware punks and weirdos, they found it profoundly alienating that they had just made the jocks’ favorite new album. This meeting of matter and antimatter contributed to Kurt Cobain’s suicide, in 1994, and helped ruin a big moment for hard rock.

After Cobain’s suicide, indie rockers embraced anything but big guitars and hooks, which were left to bands that are still the butt of jokes: Creed, Nickelback, Daughtry. By the early two-thousands, it became easy for indie rockers to score attention with blandly loud, distorted rock that might cause seizures. But catchy, melodic hard rock had become passé.

Homme ignored all this history, from Queens of the Stone Age’s first, self-titled album, in 1998, through the new one. His favored mode of songwriting is to begin with unpretentious, clipped guitar phrases, vigorous but not blustery, and drive forward with an exceptionally good drummer behind him. (Nirvana’s Dave Grohl played on “Songs for the Deaf,” from 2002, and is included on “. . . Like Clockwork.”) Homme’s singing tends toward a no-nonsense, unusually calm, low mid-range, a typical genre modification for the band: take all the power of hard rock but extract any hint of macho hysteria. Just play the song.

Homme has spent part of the past few years recovering from complications that arose during knee surgery following a motorcycle accident, and the press has described “. . . Like Clockwork” as a new direction for a resuscitated front man. In fact, the album follows neatly the band’s last one, “Era Vulgaris,” from 2007. But it’s their best work, because they’re a band that relies on fine-tuning a basic formula, and they’ve added bits that improve performance. Variance is not in their interest, and they won’t show up one day playing all acoustic or channelling the American songbook.

The opening track, “Keep Your Eyes Peeled,” shows how well this album balances its unexpected modifications, adding chords that seem to be missing one key note or dropping the band out for a small burst of drumming. The song is built on a low, basic guitar ostinato, a sort of knuckle-dragging figure. Homme finishes every other measure with a corkscrew flourish that makes it hard to gauge the emotional register of the song. The lyrics move through various images of losing control. Early on, Homme sings, “Shotgun, never behind the wheel anymore,” the words coming out one by one, in a voice that is sweeter than you expect, stripped of aggression; a keyboard matches each note, subtly propping it up, as if Homme were struggling slightly. Two heavier moments of full-on blasting follow, both quickly folded into vocals or a guitar part stranded in back, humming while the band bashes. One of the album’s most gorgeous moments comes midway through the song. Homme moves into a falsetto and reduces the band to drums and a guitar figure, with a piano punctuating certain phrases. He may actually be in Hell now, gazing up at the sky and daydreaming “until all the blue is gone.” In one five-minute track, the band gives you a précis of almost everything the album contains.

On a Friday in early June, Queens of the Stone Age played an unannounced show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, in Fort Greene. Though there was a hard and constant rain, fans waited happily to get in. The building is an imposing stone mystery on the outside, but inside there is a traditional performance space, with a proscenium stage facing a large dance floor, surrounded by a seated mezzanine.

Homme and four bandmates took the stage, accompanied by nothing more than some bright lights and a vague, colored projection. He wore a stern military-gray dress shirt; his drummer, Jon Theodore, eventually took off his shirt. His other three bandmates have a slightly darker look, as if they might be in a different, mopier band on their days off. Homme moved back and forth between a Gretsch electric guitar and an electric piano, playing “. . . Like Clockwork” in its entirety and then playing a brief handful of what qualify as hits for popular bands that don’t actually have Top Ten hits. The sound was pleasantly harsh and rattling, and several notches higher than comfortable, which was exactly right. The controlled power and variety of the set suggested that the Stone Age that Homme is interested in is rock itself, in all its iterations. It seems irrelevant whether popular and critical appreciation follows. The next album will simply continue the work. ♦

THE ART WORLD
Seeing and Disbelieving

James Turrell at the Guggenheim.

by Peter Schjeldahl

Imagine this summer’s show at the Guggenheim Museum as air-conditioning for the eye and, if you’re gamely susceptible, the soul. The show presents a number of works by James Turrell, the veteran wizard of installations that involve illusory effects of light, both natural and artificial. For the centerpiece, Frank Lloyd Wright’s great rotunda has been fitted with six evenly spaced, concentric ovoid rings, smoothly clad in white plastic. They increase in size from the top, where a translucent membrane of the plastic admits light from the skylight, to the bottom, where the last ring fills the space, about ten feet above the floor. An orchestration of slowly shifting colored light, from unseen L.E.D. fixtures between the rings, suffuses the atmosphere with one ravishing payoff after another: breathable beauty. The range of colors, from white to charcoal and from peach to plum, feels limitless: every tone, hue, and saturation that you know and some that seem minted for the occasion. Their sequence, while silent, feels musical, in the way that it flavors time, and hallucinogenic, in the way that it plays hob with spatial perception. The overhead array appears at certain moments to soar, cathedral-like, and at others to pancake into a somewhat rumpled single plane. And now and then you could swear that the order of the rings had flipped, with the lower becoming the higher and the highest thrust down to almost within arm’s reach. Don’t bother trying to think under the gentle but imperious optical onslaught. Only later might you wonder what the experience was about and what it constitutes as art.

The show, which was organized by the Guggenheim curators Carmen Giménez and Nat Trotman, coincides with two others of Turrell’s work, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The events confer a belated burst of celebrity on a man who has long figured modestly as one of the three leading artists, with Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler, in a movement called Light and Space, which arose in Los Angeles in the mid-nineteen-sixties. This is his first major appearance in New York since a retrospective at the Whitney Museum, in 1980. The relative neglect of a stunningly original artist owes much to his temperamental reclusion from the art world. Since 1981, Turrell has maintained a cattle ranch near Flagstaff, Arizona. There he has toiled incessantly (and expensively) to turn an extinct volcano, the Roden Crater, into a sculpted, many-chambered observatory of celestial phenomena. (So far, it is accessible only by invitation.) The features include a disk of white marble positioned to receive, through a tunnel, the direct light of the moon, roughly every eighteen and a half years. A round hole cut into the cone forms the granddaddy of Turrell’s “Skyspaces”—overhead, usually rectangular apertures that, as you gaze through them, make virtual pictures of the sky. On clear days, they yield flat slabs of scintillant blue. (There’s a finely crafted permanent Skyspace installation at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 affiliate, in Long Island City, where, the other day, under fleecy clouds, a little girl was heard to remark, “It’s like a TV.”)

At seventy, white of beard and hair, Turrell combines the mien of a courtly Western rancher with that of a loquacious youthful enthusiast. Meeting him at the Guggenheim, I found myself tumbling from small talk into a detailed discussion of the Pentateuch. This took off—far off, as it proceeded—from the title of the rotunda piece, “Aten Reign.” Aten is the deified sun disk associated with the fourteenth-century-B.C. pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who, by some reckonings, invented monotheism. So does the ocular-shaped “Aten Reign” represent the eye of God? Turrell, who is as difficult to pin down intellectually as his art is perceptually, disparaged the notion, while seeming to enjoy it. In regard to religion, he said, he has never ceased to value his childhood in a family of Wilburites—schismatic, traditionalist Quakers. There is something of the silent meetinghouse, awaiting visitations of the Spirit, about all his works. Turrell is coolly pragmatic in his way of conceiving art. But, should some people chance to have theophanies this summer at the Guggenheim, I doubt that he would mind.

Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943, and grew up in Pasadena. His father was an aeronautical engineer and an educator, his mother a medically trained Peace Corps volunteer. Turrell got a pilot’s license at the age of sixteen. (He was flying a small plane over the Painted Desert, in 1974, when he spotted the Roden Crater, and promptly landed. Two years later, he began negotiations with the owner to buy it.) He took courses in mathematics, geology, and astronomy at Pomona College, graduating in 1965 with a degree in perceptual psychology. He was notably fascinated by the ganzfeld effect, which is incurred by looking for a long time at a field of uniform color; the brain is overloaded and understimulated, and hallucinations may ensue. He then studied art at the University of California, Irvine, and was temporarily given the run of a derelict hotel in Santa Monica, where he plunged into researching the aesthetic possibilities of his scientific knowledge.

The time was ripe. In parallel with the revolutionary development of rudimentary geometric sculpture, in industrial materials, by the minimalists Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and others, in New York, Southern California artists were creating sleek forms, in plastics or glass, which shimmered with color and reflected or refracted light. Turrell, Irwin, and Wheeler took sensuous appearance a radical step further, eliminating objects in favor of ambiences. Compare the dreamy sorcery of Turrell’s installations with the blunt self-evidence of the fluorescent fixtures deployed in Flavin’s light pieces. At no other time have the sensibilities of America’s Atlantic and Pacific cosmopolitan antipodes stood in sharper contrast, while sharing a generational bent for rigorously reductive aesthetics.

The Guggenheim show includes such early Turrell works as “Afrum I (White)” (1967), a square of white light projected into the corner of a darkened room, where it becomes, to the viewer’s eye, a floating cube. “Prado (White)” (1967), a projected white rectangle, flush to the floor, looks like a portal to another space, while “Ronin” (1968) appears to be a projected vertical sliver of light in a corner but really is a portal, to a smooth-contoured recess that is lit from within. (Only the test of an extended hand may convince you of the fact.) “Iltar” (1976) is another deceptive hole in a wall, its interior space illuminated by lights beamed into it from outside; again, your looking engages in an intimate quarrel with knowing what you see. A bonus of the show is the enclosure of the museum’s ramp, to seal the rotunda piece against interfering light. The ramp becomes a spiral corridor, affording a novel experience of the building’s fabulous particularity.

The show’s excellence couldn’t be more timely. It satisfies two big present cravings: that of museums to attract crowds, and that of at least some in those crowds for good art. Turrell’s intuition, nearly half a century ago, of an art keyed to the physiology of eyesight made him an estimable but marginally special figure, as waves of less subtle fashion exhausted themselves. Now that mode, both seductive and serious, trumps a trend among contemporary artists, favored by art institutions, toward clamorous, hysterically clever spectacle and performance. The Guggenheim show hits an unchanging sweet spot of what we want from any museum: a place where we can go en masse and be alone. ♦

THE THEATRE
Siblings

Family drama in “The Two-Character Play” and “The Comedy of Errors.”

by Hilton Als

Days before Tennessee Williams’s 1967 chamber piece “The Two-Character Play” opened at New World Stages, I began to experience a certain apprehension. I think my anxiety was due to the fact that Williams’s late, largely neglected drama hadn’t had a full-scale production in New York since 1975 (an earlier version of the work, starring Michael York, opened on Broadway in 1973 and closed after twelve performances), and I was hoping that the upcoming effort would right several wrongs, chief among them the widespread notion that Williams failed to produce anything of merit after “The Night of the Iguana,” in 1961. The truth is that the playwright wrote some of his most kinetic, charged, and innovative work between the late sixties and his death, at the age of seventy-one, in 1983.

Williams always wanted his effects to be poetic and immediate, and yet for the first half of his career he was something of a conventional craftsman; that is, he enjoyed the challenge of writing traditional narratives that a general audience would find rewarding—and reward him for. But “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” a commercial and critical failure when it opened, in 1963, marked a substantial creative shift. It tells the tale of Flora Goforth, a terminally ill, rich woman, who’s knotted up in death and remembrance even as the performance of her life goes on. With “Milk Train,” Williams didn’t exactly draw a line between his previous plays and a more aggressive form of experimentation; he simply became more flagrant about what hadn’t been so obvious in his work before: thinking. In his earlier plays, Williams relied on various autobiographical reflexes—about his birthplace, his family, his sense of himself as a perennial outsider—to carry his characters through the emotional thickets in which they often became tangled. In “Milk Train,” Williams introduced two Stage Assistants, who function, he wrote, “in a way that’s between the Kabuki Theatre of Japan and the chorus of Greek theatre.” By outing the importance of dramatic history in his work, he acknowledged not only where he was coming from but where he needed to go: deeper into the idea of theatre as artifice. In the audience-alienating, ahead-of-their-time short plays that followed, including “The Gnädiges Fräulein” (1966), “I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow” (1966), and “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel” (1969), Williams expanded his vision of theatre as a protean art, plastic and political, as fluid as film and as structurally solid as sculpture. Inspired by the younger writers he admired and competed with, including Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, Williams’s post-“Milk Train” plays incorporate his process of intellection about characters and mise en scène—a contradiction of the general impression that, as Gore Vidal wrote in his review of Williams’s “Memoirs,” “Tennessee’s mind is not, to say the least, at home with theory.”

One of the many remarkable things about “The Two-Character Play” is that it is a play about theory, a drama about playing, about how performers put real life on hold in order to enact it. We enter the theatre to find that the stage itself is a theatre. Its set is made up of some junk and props for a director to transform with his imagination: there’s a ratty sofa, a small table, an old reel-to-reel tape deck, a piano, some shawls. Felice (Brad Dourif) appears. His graying hair grazes the collar of his old coat. In the half-light, we can just make out that he has the inward stare of someone who is more comfortable in the dark. But, in order to be seen, he requires light: Felice is an aging actor fading from public view; he’s also a writer and director, trying to get his play mounted in an unnamed town. It’s called “The Two-Character Play,” and it stars Felice and his sister, Clare. “Fear,” Felice says, sitting near the piano and writing in the air. “Fear! The fierce little man with the drum inside the rib cage. . . . There is the love and the—substitutions, the surrogate attachments, doomed to brief duration, no matter how—necessary,” he adds, speaking to himself and, increasingly, to us. “You can’t . . . cry out to a person . . . ‘Take care of me, I’m frightened, don’t know the next step!’ ”

After a while, Clare (Amanda Plummer), a little unsteady herself, enters. She may not know where she is, but she knows who she and her brother are. They’re one and the same and sometimes different:

CLARE: I thought I saw—

FELICE: Apparitions this evening?

CLARE: No, it was just my—shadow, it scared me but it was just my shadow, that’s all. —A doctor once told me that you and I were the bravest people he knew. I said, “Why, that’s absurd, my brother and I are terrified of our shadows.” And he said, “Yes, I know that, and that’s why I admire your courage so much.”

Williams is fascinated by Clare and Felice’s doubling, both in their shared ragtag style (an adult version of Willie’s pre-adolescent dress-up in Williams’s early one-act “This Property Is Condemned”) and in their language: they anticipate and sometimes finish each other’s sentences, as if they were having a single thought. Not only do they have the courage of actors—who are compelled to continually expose themselves to an audience—but each of them keeps pushing to discover who the other is, like performers doomed to a never-ending, soul-searing improvisation.

Speaking softly to his sister, Felice explains why they can’t leave this “primitive God-knows-where place,” as Clare derisively calls it. Their money has dried up, and their manager, Fox, and the company’s other players have run off, presumably to seek work elsewhere. Now Clare and Felice must perform “The Two-Character Play” alone if they are to fulfill their professional obligation. But Clare is reluctant to continue acting. Such is the power of sense memory that she dreads returning to even the fictionalized version of their childhood home that provides the setting for “The Two-Character Play.” Shut off from the rest of the world by sunflowers, secrets, and a history of violence that includes, perhaps, murder and suicide (their father may have killed their mother and then shot himself, or this lurid memory may be the product of Clare’s and Felice’s orphaned imaginations), the house locks brother and sister in an atmosphere of familial guilt. For Clare, the psychological cost of drawing on her real life in order to give life to an invented one is enormous. She wants to call it quits, and this stop on the long road of self-expression seems as good a place as any to hang up her tiara. “If this theatre is home, I’d burn it down over my head to be warm a few minutes,” she says. But the show must go on, and Clare, unable to detach herself from her brother and his dream of their life together, agrees to perform a truncated version of “The Two-Character Play.”

During the interval, I thought about all that had come before. The weakness of Gene David Kirk’s direction was breaking my heart. In addition to his confused and blah staging, muddled set design, strange lighting, and poor decision to cast Dourif in a role that he had no idea how to handle intellectually or emotionally, Kirk had failed to fully harness Plummer’s titanic power and vision. Clare is the vibrant bloody heart of the play. In addition to being a stand-in for Williams’s own disturbed and deeply loved sister, Rose, she is the show’s de-facto dramaturge. She knows what this piece is about, despite its obfuscations, and she wants us to know it, too.

The ardent and ravenous Plummer, returning to the New York stage after a fifteen-year absence, has lost none of the gifts that made her such an astonishment when she began her career, in the late seventies. With her unparalleled voice, which can go from a little-girl lisp to an Alexandra Del Lago growl in less than three seconds, she is an ideal Williams performer, because she understands his obsession with the ways in which acting can play with and off the drama of sentences. And, like Geraldine Page before her, Plummer renders the unreal real, through her special relationship to props and costuming: she treats these things as if they were entirely new, while giving us the sense that she has lived with them forever. On the night that I saw the show, some audience members laughed at Plummer’s intensity, as though they found it embarrassing. Perhaps the combination of Williams’s and Plummer’s high style was too much for them. Kirk was no match for either.

In the same week that I saw “The Two-Character Play,” I also saw Daniel Sullivan’s staging of “The Comedy of Errors” (a Public Theatre production, at the Delacorte). Sullivan has built a wisp of a show. You couldn’t hang a butterfly on it, let alone any real criticism, since the production—which whittles Shakespeare’s play down to ninety intermissionless minutes and throws in a bit of John Garfield forties-era style to boot—is meant not to be examined but seen, sat through. This “Comedy of Errors” requires nothing of you, and neither can you expect anything of it. If you do, restrict your expectations to the lanky, dark-haired Hamish Linklater—he’s Frank Langella out for a bit of fun—and his fabulous performance as the twins Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Ephesus. The usual stuff: separated at birth, the brothers find each other in Ephesus, where it’s revealed that their servants, both named Dromio (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), are also twins. Lots of slapstick, a few dance numbers, and then the happy, crowd-pleasing resolution at the end.

Afterward, I wondered why Sullivan’s staging made me angry and “The Two-Character Play” didn’t. I think it was because the former caters to our lowest common denominator, while Plummer, without trying to upstage Dourif—she works with what he can give, despite his distracting habit of emphasizing his words by pointing a finger or wringing his hands—remains adamant about the challenge of the work. The brilliant grief and madness in Plummer’s voice when Felice suggests that he and his sister go out into the world recalls not only Williams’s lifelong struggle to keep reality at bay by imagining something else but also the ways in which one sibling’s body and feelings can inhabit another’s. Clare is always looking for ways to separate from her brother, the better to see him and herself more clearly. In the middle of the final act, she tells him, “The worst thing that’s disappeared in our lives is not the Company, not Fox, not brandy in your flask, not successes that give confidence to go on—no, none of that. The worst thing that’s disappeared in our lives is being aware of what’s going on in our lives.” Which is where the uncompromising work of being an artist has to begin—and end. ♦

THE CURRENT CINEMA
Life and Undeath

“World War Z.”

by David Denby

After seeing “World War Z,” I walked through Times Square, and, as I made my way to the subway, I wondered why the movie—which is, after all, just a very expensive zombie flick—had excited and disturbed me so much. On Broadway, there were no zombies in immediate sight, only a happy and friendly crowd. Yet I felt a vague uneasiness at the sheer number of people milling about—a sense that they could all be transformed into something malevolent or frightened. Absurd? Mere paranoia? Maybe, but who hasn’t felt a tinge of paranoia while walking on crowded streets, particularly streets thronged with barkers for standup comics? The movie, which was directed by Marc Forster and was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan and a host of collaborators, evokes the hectic density of modern life; it stirs fears of plague and anarchy, and the feeling that everything is constantly accelerating. At times, it has the tone and the tempo of panic.

“World War Z” went through an enormous amount of rewriting and reshooting. Yet, despite some conventional passages and a soft ending, Forster and Brad Pitt, who is a producer of the film as well as its star, pulled the picture together. They also managed to reawaken in a large-scale movie the experience of shock, something that has been superseded, in recent years, by digital slam and much whooshing from nowhere to nowhere. I’m not an expert on horror movies, but I know when my heart rate has doubled. “World War Z” explodes right after the opening scenes, in which we see warnings that things are going awry: news reports of feral animals and dead dolphins, roving mobs and rioters—the usual premonitory noise that opens any disaster movie. Gerry Lane (Pitt), a retired United Nations trouble-shooter; his wife, Karin (Mireille Enos); and their two young daughters, driving in the family S.U.V., get stuck in traffic in downtown Philadelphia. Suddenly, the street erupts: motorcycle cops whizz by, a garbage truck plows through the waiting cars, there’s an explosion up ahead, and people start running, terrified. The speed and the violence hit you like lightning. Then, gradually, in brief, searing glimpses, you see them: human-looking creatures, with disintegrating flesh and wild eyes, biting and mauling people and causing general mayhem. These scenes suggest how quickly a major American city can fall into chaos. But what’s causing the behavior? A viral outbreak? At first, no one uses the word “zombie”—it seems too silly.

I was unnerved by the hurtling strangeness of the Philadelphia scenes, and I say this as someone who has sat through such war-of-the-worlds extravaganzas as “The Avengers” and the new Superman movie, “Man of Steel,” without feeling so much as a tingle. “Man of Steel,” which is more leaden than steely, is an example of everything that has gone wrong with so many big-budget spectacles. The characters declaim in blustering tones; ironclad bodies bash one another to pieces; there isn’t a joke or a satirical moment anywhere. The new Superman, Henry Cavill, bares his muscular chest; the hero is no longer a boy’s amiable fantasy of strength but the literal embodiment of power, with the heft and the thickness of a lifetime gym bunny. When war breaks out between Krypton and Earth, this physical paragon chooses our side. Manhattan (in the guise of Metropolis) gets flattened (don’t worry, Brooklyn is spared), yet no one you care about is in any danger. It’s an exhaustingly empty and emotion-free movie, a routine multi-hundred-million-dollar product.

“World War Z” is the most gratifying action spectacle in years, and one reason for its success is that Pitt doesn’t play a superhero. Gerry Lane is tough and infinitely resourceful (he could reset his own broken arm if he had to), but he doesn’t fly, he doesn’t pass through walls, and, in the long tradition of unpretentious movie heroes, he’s reluctant and terse. Early in the film, the Under-Secretary-General of the U.N. (Fana Mokoena), who seems to be one of the most powerful men left alive, tells Gerry that entire cities have fallen to the creatures, and he is the only one who can save the planet. So Gerry sets off in search of the first victim in order to find the cause of the outbreak—whatever it is—and then a cure. As he flies around the world, the audience is pulled slowly but ineluctably into the horror. At an American military post in South Korea, the soldiers know exactly what they’re dealing with. They call the creatures Zekes, and they would rather be shot than become one of them. The sequence is forbiddingly dark, rain-soaked, terror-streaked—a fleeting nightmare that recaps the pace and the charge of the Philadelphia scenes. You can admire a movie like Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” (2011), a realistic rendering of civil breakdown caused by a spreading pathogen, but the horror-film version of disaster in “World War Z” stretches the senses to take in more than you may expect. Pop dynamism can tear through normal expectations when the fantastic is as precise as this.

Vampirism, as everyone says, is about sex and violation. But what is the fascination with the hungry undead about? The origins of zombie lore in Africa and the Caribbean—voodoo, witch doctors, reanimated corpses—have long been appropriated by the modern media. The undead really do keep on coming; they are taking over our bookstores, our movie theatres, our cable channels. Every neighborhood has a zombie or two. Are they what we fear we might become if we let ourselves go—soulless vessels of pure appetite, both ravaged and ravaging? Do they represent our apprehension of what hostility lies behind all those blank faces in the office, at the mall, across the dinner table? In George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” the low-budget classic from 1968, zombies tilt from side to side as they walk, slowly, their arms outstretched in an almost beseeching manner. Romero recognized our desire to understand, so the movie offers a mid-century sci-fi explanation: a space probe to Venus has returned home poisoned by radiation that infects unburied corpses. Despite this information, however, the movie remains unfathomable and tragic: a young girl, who has been bitten, attacks her mother. There was no safety anywhere. But that was just the beginning. By 2006, when Max Brooks published his novel “World War Z” (from which the movie is very loosely adapted), the worst has already happened: the zombies have been vanquished, but only after destroying a good bit of the world’s population. The survivors, in an “oral history,” recollect the past.

Zombies are so frightening, in part, because they prey on an infinite number of victims, and they don’t need weapons. They aren’t an army that can be licked; they have no purpose except replication. In the AMC series “The Walking Dead,” a group of human survivors band together and keep on the move, clearing safe havens for themselves. In their world, humans have been marginalized; the zombies have mostly taken over. The show devotes large chunks of time to the tangled emotional and sexual relations among the group, but it always comes back to a vicious turkey shoot, in which the women as well as the men attack dozens of the slow-moving undead, sticking sharpened poles into their faces, and slicing off their heads. In popular culture, apparently, anything can be justified by the need to survive, although some viewers may feel disgust at the righteous mayhem.

Many Zekes are slaughtered in “World War Z,” but it’s not a turkey shoot. Gerry travels on to Israel, which has successfully walled itself off from peril. Uninfected humans outside Jerusalem, Palestinians among them, are allowed into the city, suggesting a warming belief in unity against a third force. The joyful crowd sings so loudly, though, that the noise attracts the Zekes. What follows is astonishing, one of the rare thrilling passages of digital invention in film: assaulting the wall from the outside, the zombies, thousands of them, mount on top of one another, feverishly falling and scrambling up again, until they get over the top. These Zekes are certainly not slow-moving. Once in the city, they race down the narrow ancient passageways, like water bursting a dam, all the while shrieking in agony. Thinking about the Jerusalem sequence, I realized why I felt uneasy in Times Square. The zombies aren’t like us; they are us, just degraded a little. And what the zombie media splurge may unconsciously express is not just a fear that people might become hostile but a desire to be free of the crowd—to “decrease the surplus population.” Calling on Freud hasn’t been much in vogue in recent years, but asking for a consultation about the zombie obsession—why do we long for what terrifies us, doctor?—might not be a bad idea. ♦

FICTION
“Mastiff”

by Joyce Carol Oates

Earlier, on the trail, they’d seen it. The massive dog. Tugging at its master’s leash, so that the young man’s calves bulged with muscle as he fought to hold the dog back. Grunting what sounded like “Damn, Rob-roy! Damn dog!” in a tone of exasperated affection.

Signs along the trail forbade dogs without leashes. At least this dog was on a leash.

The woman stared at the animal, not twelve feet away, wheezing and panting. Its head was larger than hers, with a pronounced black muzzle, bulging glassy eyes. Its jaws were powerful and slack; its large, long tongue, as rosy-pink as a sexual organ, dripped slobber. The dog was pale-brindle-furred, with a deep chest, strong shoulders and legs, a taut tail. It must have weighed at least two hundred pounds. Its breathing was damply audible, unsettling.

The dog’s straggly-bearded young master, in beige hoodie, khaki cargo shorts, and hiking boots, gripped the leather leash with both hands, squinting at the woman, and at the man behind her, with an expression that seemed apologetic or defensive; or maybe, the woman thought, the young man was laughing at them, ordinary hikers without a monster-dog to pull and strain at their arms.

The woman thought, That isn’t a dog. It’s a human being on its hands and knees! Such surreal thoughts bombarded the woman’s brain, waking and sleeping. As long as no one else knew about them, she paid them little heed.

Fortunately, the dog and its owner were taking another trail into Wildcat Canyon. The dog lunged forward eagerly, sniffing at the ground, the young man following with muttered curses. The woman and her male companion continued on the main trail, which was three miles uphill, into the sun, to Wildcat Peak.

The man, sensing the woman’s unease at the sight of the dog, made some joke, which the woman couldn’t quite hear and did not acknowledge. They were walking single file, the woman in the lead. She waited for the man to touch her shoulder, as another man might have done, to reassure her, but she knew that he would not, and he did not. Instead, the man said, in a tone of slight reproof, that the dog was an English mastiff—“Beautiful dog.”

Much of what the man said to the woman, she understood, was in rebuke of her narrow judgment, her timorous ways. Sometimes the man was amused by these qualities. At other times, she saw in his face an expression of startled disapproval, veiled contempt.

The woman said, over her shoulder, with a wild little laugh, “Yes! Beautiful.”

The hike had been the man’s suggestion. Or, rather, in his oblique way, which was perhaps a strategy of shyness, he’d simply told her that he was going hiking this weekend, and asked if she wanted to join him. He had not risked being rejected; he’d made it clear that he would be going, regardless.

The woman had been introduced to the man seven weeks earlier, at a dinner party at a mutual friend’s home in the Berkeley Hills. The friend, closer to the man than to the woman, had said to the man, “You’ll like Mariella. You’ll like her face,” and to the woman, “Simon’s an extraordinary person, but it may not be evident immediately. Give him time.”

The woman and the man had gone on several walks together already. But a hike of such ambition seemed, to the woman, something quite different.

She’d said, “Yes! I’d love that.”

It was late afternoon. They had been hiking for several hours, and were now making their way single file down the mountain. The woman was descending first, then the man. The man, the more experienced hiker, wanted to watch over the woman, whom he didn’t trust not to hurt herself. She’d surprised him by wearing lightweight running shoes on the trail and not, as he was wearing, hiking boots.

She hadn’t thought to bring water, either. He carried a twenty-ounce plastic bottle of water for them both.

The man was a little annoyed by the woman. Yet he was drawn to her. He hoped to like her more than he did—he hoped to adore her. He had been very lonely for too long and had come to bitterly resent the solitude of his life.

It had been an unnaturally balmy day for late March. At midday, the temperature was perhaps sixty-eight degrees. But now, as the sun sank like a broken bloody egg, darkness and cold began to rise from the earth. The day before, the man had suggested to the woman that she bring a light canvas jacket in her backpack; he knew how quickly the mountain trail could turn cold in the late afternoon, but she had worn just a sweater, jeans, and a sun visor. (The woman’s eyes were sensitive to sunlight, even with sunglasses. She hated how easily they watered, tears running down her cheeks like an admission of weakness.) And she’d confounded the man by not bringing a backpack at all, with the excuse that she hated feeling “burdened.” In the gathering chill, the woman was shivering.

The trail had looped upward through pine woods to a spectacular view at the peak, where the man had given the woman some water to drink. Though she said she wasn’t thirsty, he insisted. There’s a danger of dehydration when you’ve been exerting yourself, he said. He spoke sternly, as if he were a parent she could not reasonably oppose. He spoke with the confidence of one who is rarely challenged. At times, the woman quite liked his air of authority; other times, she resented it. The man seemed always to be regarding her with a bemused look, like a scientist confronted with a curious specimen. She didn’t want to think—yet she thought, compulsively—that he was comparing her with other women he’d known, and finding her lacking.

Then the man took photographs with his new camera, while the woman gazed out at the view. Along the horizon was a rim of luminous blue—the Pacific Ocean, miles away. In the near distance were small lakes, streams. The hills were strangely sculpted, like those bald slopes in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton.

Absorbed in his photography, the man seemed to forget about the woman. How self-contained he could be, how maddening! The woman had never been so at repose in her self. For nearly an hour, he lingered, taking photographs. During this time, other hikers came and went. The woman spoke briefly with these hikers, while the man appeared oblivious of them. It wasn’t his habit, he’d told her, to strike up conversations with “random” people. “Why not?” she’d asked. And he’d said, with a look that suggested that her question was virtually incomprehensible, “Why not? Because I’ll never see them again.”

With her provocative little laugh, the woman had said, “But that’s the best reason for talking to strangers—you’ll never see them again.”

At least the bearded young man with the English mastiff hadn’t climbed to the top of Wildcat Peak, though other hikers with dogs had made their way there. A succession of dogs, in fact, of all sizes and breeds, fortunately most of them well behaved and disinclined to bark, several of them trailing their masters, older dogs, looking chastised, winded.

“Nice dog! What’s his name?” the woman would ask. Or, “What breed is he?”

She understood that the man had taken note of her fear of the mastiff at the start of the hike. How she’d tensed at the sight of the ugly wheezing beast. It had to be the largest dog she’d ever seen, as big as a St. Bernard but totally lacking that dog’s benign shaggy aura. And so at the peak the woman made a point of engaging dog owners in conversations, in a bright, airy, friendly way. She even petted the gentler dogs.

As a child of nine or ten, she’d been attacked by a German shepherd. She’d done nothing to provoke the attack and could only remember screaming and trying to run as the dog barked furiously at her and snapped at her bare legs. Only the intervention of adults had saved her.

The woman hadn’t told the man much about her past. Not yet. And possibly wouldn’t. Her principle was Never reveal your weakness. Especially to strangers: this was essential. Technically, the woman and the man were “lovers,” but they were not yet intimate. You might say—the woman might have said—that they were still, fundamentally, strangers to each other.

They’d been together in the woman’s house, upstairs in her bed, but they hadn’t yet spent an entire night together. The man felt self-conscious in the woman’s house, and the woman hadn’t been able to fall asleep beside him; the physical fact of him was so distracting. Naked and horizontal, the man seemed much larger than he did clothed and vertical. He breathed loudly, wetly, through his open mouth, and though he woke affably when she nudged him, the woman hadn’t wanted to keep waking him. In truth, the woman had never been very comfortable with a man at close quarters, unless she’d been drinking. But this man scarcely drank. And the woman no longer lost herself in drink; that life was behind her.

The woman liked to tell her friends that she wanted not to get married but to be married. She wanted a relationship that seemed mature, if not old and settled, from the start. Newness and rawness did not appeal to her.

“Excuse me? When do you think we might head back?” She spoke to the man hesitantly, not wanting to break his concentration. In their relationship, she had not yet displayed any impatience; she had not yet raised her voice.

At last, the man put his camera, a heavy, complicated instrument, into his backpack, along with the water bottle, which contained just two or three inches of water now—“We might need this later.” His movements were measured and deliberate, as if he were alone, and the woman felt a sudden stab of dislike for him, anger that he could take such care with trivial matters and yet did not seem to love her.

There were no rest rooms on the damn trail, of course. These were serious hiking trails, for serious hikers. Longingly, the woman recalled the facilities at the trailhead. How long would it take to hike back down? An hour? Two? For male hikers, stopping to urinate in the woods was no great matter; for female hikers, an effort and an embarrassment. Not since she was a young girl, trapped on an endless, hateful hike in summer camp in the Adirondacks, had she been forced to relieve herself in the woods. The memory was hazy and blurred with shame, and humiliation at the very pettiness of her discomfort. If she’d told this story to the man, he would probably have laughed at her.

Driving to the park that day, the man and the woman had felt very happy together. It sometimes happened to them, unpredictably—a sudden flaring up of happiness, even joy, in each other’s company. The man was unusually talkative. The woman laughed at his remarks, surprised that he could be so witty. She was touched that, a few days before, he’d visited the art gallery she ran, and purchased a small soapstone sculpture.

The woman slid over in the passenger’s seat, to sit closer to the man, as a young girl might do, impulsively. How natural this felt—a rehearsal of intimacy!

The car radio was playing a piano piece by the Czech composer Janáček, “In the Mists.” The woman recognized it after a few notes. She’d played the piano cycle as a girl. Her eyes filled with tears as she remembered. The man continued talking, as if he didn’t hear the music. Avidly, the woman listened to the sombre, distinctive notes in a minor—“misty”—key. She didn’t register the man’s words, but his voice was suffused with the melancholy beauty of the music, and she felt that she loved him or might love him. He will be the one. It’s time.

The woman was forty-one years old. The man was several years older. He had been the director of a research laboratory in Berkeley for many years. His work was predominant in his life. He was idealistic, a zealot for science education and the preservation of the environment. He was famously generous to younger scientists, a legendary mentor to his graduate students and postdocs. He’d never married. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been in love. Though he’d always wanted children, he had none. He was dissatisfied with his life outside the lab. He felt cheated and foolish, worried that others might pity him.

He’d been upset earlier that year, while visiting one of his protégés at the Salk Institute, whose wife was also a scientist and who had several children; the young family lived in a split-level cedar house on three acres of wooded land. In this household, the man had felt sharply the emptiness of his own existence, in an underfurnished, rented house near the university, where he’d lived for more than twenty years. He’d ended the visit shaken. And not long afterward he’d met the woman at a dinner party.

The woman was also lonely and dissatisfied—but primarily with others, not with herself. She’d had several relationships with men since college, but she hadn’t felt much for any of them. Some she had dated simultaneously. And yet she was deeply hurt if a man wasn’t exclusively involved with her. Her father had left the family when she was a child and rarely visited. All her life she’d yearned for that absent man, even as she’d resented him. She’d hated her own vulnerability.

She was an attractive woman. Within her small circle of friends, she was popular, admired. She dressed stylishly. She was social. She’d invested wisely in her art gallery. Still, she was preoccupied with how she appeared in others’ eyes. She could barely force herself to contemplate her own image in a mirror: her face, she thought, was too small, her chin too narrow, her eyes too large and deep-set. She hated the fact that she was petite. She’d have preferred to be five feet ten, to walk with a swagger, with sexual confidence. At five-three, it seemed she had no choice but to be the recipient, the receptacle, of a man’s desire.

Sometimes, in the midst of buoyant social occasions, something inside the woman seemed to switch off. She could feel a deadness seeping into her, a chilly indifference. At the end of an evening, her women friends would hug her, or a friend’s husband might slip his arm around her waist to kiss her, just a little too suggestively, and the coldness in her would respond, I don’t give a damn if I ever see any of you again.

She laughed at herself. A hole in the heart.

Yet it happened, in the new man’s company, that the woman felt a rare hopefulness. If she couldn’t love the man, it might be enough for the man to love her; enough for them to have a child together, at least. (In the woman’s weakest moments, she lamented the fact that she had no children, that she would soon be too old to have any. Yet children bored her, even her nieces and nephews, who she conceded were beautiful.)

What would the man have thought if he’d known about the woman’s calculations? Or were these just harmless fantasies, unlikely to be realized?

Now, making her way down the trail, eager to be out of the park that had seemed so inviting hours ago, the woman felt disconsolate. The long wait at the peak had enervated her. The man’s seeming indifference had enervated her. As the sun shifted in the sky, she felt strength leaking from her.

Brooding and silent, the man walked behind her, sometimes so close that he nearly trod on her heels. She wanted to turn and shout at him, “Don’t do that! I’m going as fast as I can.”

So absorbed was the woman with the voice inside her head that she only half realized that she’d been hearing a familiar sound somewhere close by—a wet chuffing noise, a labored breathing. The trail continued to drop, turning back on itself; another, lower trail ran parallel to it now, and would join it within a few yards, and on this trail two figures were hurrying, one of them, in the lead, a large beast running on all fours.

Appalled, the woman saw the enormous mastiff stop at the junction of the two trails, unavoidable. The dog’s damp, shining eyes were fixed on her, sharply focussed. With a kind of indignation quickly shifting to fury, it barked at the woman, straining at its leash as the bearded young man yelled at it to sit.

The woman knew better than to succumb to panic; certainly she knew better than to provoke the dog. But she couldn’t help herself—she screamed and shrank away. It was the worst possible reaction to the dog, which, maddened by her terror, leaped at her, barking and growling, wrenching the leash out of its master’s hands.

In an instant, the mastiff was on the woman, snarling and biting, nearly knocking her to the ground. Even in her horror, the woman was thinking, My face. I must protect my face.

Her companion quickly intervened, pushing himself between her and the dog, even as the dog, on its hind legs, continued to attack. Futilely, the dog’s master shouted, “Rob-roy! Rob-roy!” The dog paid not the slightest attention.

The frantic struggle couldn’t have lasted more than a minute or two. Fiercely, the man struck at the dog with his bare fists and kicked it. The young man yanked at the dog’s collar, cursing. With great effort, he finally managed to pull the animal away from the man, who was bleeding badly now from lacerations on his hands and arms and face.

The woman, terrified, was cringing behind him. She felt something wet on her face. Not blood but the dog’s slobber. She called out, “Help him! Get help for him! He’ll bleed to death.”

The dog was still barking hysterically, lunging and leaping with bared fangs, while the young man struggled to hold it down, apologizing profusely, claiming that the dog had never done anything like this before—not ever. “Jesus! I’ll get help.” There was a ranger station a half mile down the trail, the young man said. He’d run.

Alone with the injured man, the woman cradled him in her arms as he moaned in pain. He appeared to be dazed, stupefied. Was he in shock? His skin felt cold to the woman’s touch. She could barely comprehend what had happened, and so swiftly.

The dog had bitten and scratched her hands, too. She was bleeding. But her fear was for the man. She fumbled in her pocket for her cell phone, tried to call 911, but the call failed to go through. She wondered whether she should make a tourniquet to stanch the flow of blood from the man’s forearm. Years ago, in high school, she’d taken a course in first aid, but could she remember now? For a tourniquet, you had to use a stick? Her eyes darted about, searching for—what? Like a foolish trapped bird, her heart beat erratically in her chest.

The man insisted now that he was all right, that he could walk to the ranger station. Grotesquely, he tried to laugh. He had no idea how torn and bloody his face was.

The woman helped him to his feet. How heavy he was, how uncoördinated! His face was a mask of blood, flaps of loose skin on his cheeks and forehead. One of his earlobes was torn. At least his eyes had been spared.

The woman gripped the man around the waist, clumsily, and he was able to walk, leaning on her. She tried to comfort him—she had no idea what she was saying, except that there would be help for him soon, he would be all right. She saw that the front and sleeves of her sweater were soaked in dark blood.

By this time, the sun had sunk below the tree line. It was dusk, and the air was cold and wet, as if after a rain. They began to hear calls—two rangers were running up the shadowy trail with flashlights, shouting.

They were taken to the ranger station and given first aid. Sterilizing liquid, bandages. For the man’s lacerated forearm, a tourniquet deftly applied by the elder of the rangers, who told the man how lucky he was: “The artery wasn’t severed.” With a dog attack, there was the possibility of rabies. It was imperative to locate the dog. It seemed that the young man had fled the park with the mastiff. Incredibly, he had not even reported the attack. But a hiker, who had witnessed it from a distance, had alerted the rangers and taken down the plate number of the young man’s Jeep. The son of a bitch would be prosecuted for the attack, and for leaving the scene, too, the ranger said.

Around the bandages, the man’s face was ashen. His breath came quickly and shallowly. He was urged to lie down on a cot. Despite his protests, an ambulance was called. His injuries required stitches—that was clear.

Within minutes, the ambulance arrived in the now near-deserted parking lot. The woman wanted to ride with the man, but he insisted that she take his car and meet him at the hospital; he didn’t want his vehicle to be locked in the park overnight.

Even with his injuries, and speaking with difficulty, the man appeared to be thinking calmly, rationally.

The woman took his keys, and his wallet and backpack, and followed the ambulance along curving mountain roads in his station wagon. She could hardly breathe, her loneliness as palpable and suffocating as cotton batting.

She still could not quite fathom the idea that the dog’s owner had fled the park without reporting the attack. The young man had cared so little about their welfare; he’d fled knowing that if his dog wasn’t located by the authorities both victims would have to endure rabies shots.

She’d been told by the rangers that he would be apprehended within a few hours. The attack had already been reported to the local police. A warrant would be issued for the dog owner’s arrest. She’d been assured that the authorities would find the man and check the dog for rabies, but in her distressed state she’d scarcely been able to listen or to care.

At the brightly lit clinic, the woman hurried inside as the man was carried into the E.R. on a stretcher. He seemed to be only partly conscious now, unaware of his surroundings. She asked one of the medical workers what was wrong and was told that the man had had a kind of seizure in the ambulance; he’d lost consciousness, his blood pressure had risen alarmingly, and his heartbeat had accelerated, in fibrillation.

Fibrillation! The woman knew only vaguely what this meant.

She was prevented from following the man into the E.R. She found herself standing at a counter, being asked questions. She fumbled with the man’s wallet, searching for his health-insurance card. His university I.D. How slowly she moved—as clumsy in her bandages as if she were wearing mittens. One of the E.M.T.s was telling her that she should be treated as well; her lacerated hands and wrists should be examined. But the woman refused to listen. She flushed with indignation when the woman behind the counter asked how she was related to the injured man. Sharply she said, “I am his fiancée.”

How long she remained in the E.R. waiting room the woman had no clear idea. Time had become disjointed. Her eyelids were so heavy she could barely keep them open. Several times, she inquired after the man and was told that he was undergoing emergency treatment for cardiac arrhythmia and that she could not see him yet. This news was unacceptable to her. He’d only been bitten by a damn dog! He hadn’t seemed so badly injured; he’d insisted on walking. The woman was light-headed. Her hands and wrists began to burn. She heard her thin, plaintive voice, begging, “Don’t let him die!”

Looking around, she saw how others regarded her. A woman crazed with worry, fear. A woman whose voice was raised in panic. The sort of woman you pity even as you inch away from her.

She saw that her coarse-knit Scottish sweater—it had been one of her favorites—had been torn beyond repair.

In a fluorescent-lit rest room, her face in the mirror was blurred, like those faces on TV that are pixelated in order to disguise their identity. She was thinking of how the massive dog had thrown itself at her and how, astonishingly, the man had protected her. Did the man love her, then? What a coward she’d been, ducking behind him to save herself, grabbing at him desperately, cringing, crouching, whimpering like a terrified child. The man had thrust himself forward to be attacked in her place. A man who was virtually a stranger had risked his life for her.

The woman had the man’s backpack, with his camera and his wallet. In a state of nervous dread, she looked through the wallet, a leather billfold of good quality but badly worn. Credit cards, university I.D., library card, driver’s license. A miniature photo of a tensely smiling middle-aged man with a furrowed forehead and thinning shoulder-length hair, whom she would have claimed she’d never seen before. She discovered that he was born in 1956—he was fifty-seven years old! A decade older than she’d guessed, and sixteen years older than she was.

Another card indicated that the man had a cardiac condition—mitral-valve prolapse. There was a much folded prescription, dated several years before, for a medication to be administered intravenously. Nearest of kin to be notified in case of emergency: a woman with the man’s last name, possibly a sister, who lived in San Diego.

The woman hurried to the desk to speak with a nurse. She pressed the prescription on the woman, who promised to report this discovery to the cardiac specialist overseeing the man’s treatment.

They were only humoring her, the woman supposed. The hysterical fiancée! They’d performed their own tests on the stricken man.

“Ma’am?” The waiting room was nearly empty when an attendant came to inform her that her companion was to be hospitalized for the night, kept under observation in the cardiac unit. The cardiologist on call had managed to control the man’s fibrillation and his heartbeat was near normal, but his blood pressure was still high and his white-blood-cell count was low. The woman tried to feel relief. Tried to think, Now I can go home, the danger is past.

Instead, she went upstairs to the cardiac unit. For several minutes, she stood outside the doorway of the man’s room, undecided whether to enter. Inside, the man lay unnaturally still, as nurses fussed about him. His heartbeat was monitored by a machine. His breathing was monitored. The woman saw that the bandages hurriedly applied to his face at the ranger station had been removed; his numerous wounds had been stitched together and bandaged again, in an elaborate and lurid mask of crisscrossing strips of white. The man’s arms and hands had been re-bandaged as well.

As she entered the room, she thought she might faint. Yet she felt gratitude for the man’s courage, and for his kindness. Shame for herself, that she’d valued the man so little.

She pulled over a chair and sat beside his bed.

The man’s breathing was quick and shallow but rhythmic. The bed had been cranked to a thirty-three-degree angle. His eyelids fluttered. Was he seeing her? Did he recognize her? The woman thought, He has forgotten my name.

The man was trying to speak. Or—trying to smile? He was asking her—what? His words were slurred.

She heard herself explain that she would stay with him for a while. Until visiting hours ended. She had his wallet and his camera and the key to his station wagon. She said that she would return in the morning, when he was to be discharged, and would drive him home then. If he wanted. If he needed her. She would return, and bring his things with her, and drive him home. Did he understand?

In his cranked-up bed, the man drifted into sleep. They’d given him a sedative, the woman supposed. His mouth eased open, and he breathed heavily, wetly. This was the night-breathing the woman recalled, and now felt comforted to hear. She practiced pronouncing his name: “Simon.” It seemed to her suddenly a beautiful name. A name new to her, in her life, for she’d never before known anyone named Simon.

Now tears spilled from the woman’s eyes and ran in rivulets down her face. She was crying as she had not cried in memory. She was too old for such emotion; there was something ridiculous and demeaning about it. But she was remembering how at the top of the steep trail the man had insisted that she drink from his plastic water bottle. She hadn’t wanted to drink the lukewarm water, yet had drunk it as the man watched, acquiescing, if with resistance, resentment. In their relationship, the man would always be the stronger; she would resent his superior strength, yet she would be protected by it. She might defy it, but she would not oppose it. She was thinking of the two or three occasions when she’d kissed the man in a pretense of an emotion she hadn’t yet felt.

Like the man, the woman was exhausted. She laid her head against the headrest of the chair beside the bed. Her eyelids closed. Vividly, she saw him at the peak of the Wildcat Canyon trail, holding his complicated camera aloft, peering through the viewfinder. The wind stirred his thinning silvery-copper hair—she hadn’t noticed that before. She would go to him, she thought. She would stand close beside him, slide her arm around his waist to steady him. This was her task, her duty. He was stronger than she, but a man’s strength can drain from him. A man’s courage can be torn from him, can bleed away. But it was she who was afraid of something—wasn’t she? The pale-blue rim of the Pacific Ocean. The bald-sculpted hills and exquisite little lakes that seemed as unreal as papier-mâché that you could poke your fingers through. To her horror, she realized she was hearing a panting sound, a wet-chuffing breath, somewhere beside her, or below her on the trail, in the gathering dusk, waiting. ♦

POEMS
“Xanthopsia”

by Maxine Kumin

It wasn’t absinthe or digitalis

in the Yellow House the two of them shared

that led him to layer the chrome coronas

or yellow the sheets in the bedroom in Arles

or tinge the towel negligently hung

on the hook by the door, or yellow the window,

be it distant view or curtain, yolk-lick

the paintings on the wall by the monkish bed.

No, it wasn’t sunstroke or the bright light

of southern France that yellowed the café terrace

at the Place du Forum, a pigment

intensified by the little white tables, the white stars

in a blue sky, the deep-saffron floor, it wasn’t

some chemical or physical insult that stained

the vase with twelve sunflowers a urinous

yellow, the water in the vase yellow,

also the table under the vase—such

a troubled life of yellow leading up

to Vincent’s hurled wineglass arousing

Gauguin’s rapier to sever his best friend’s left ear,

the story they made up that Vincent lopped it

off himself, wrapped it, ran down the road

to the nearby bordello, where his favorite whore

opened her present and fainted. He would

have bled to death if Gauguin hadn’t hauled him

to hospital next morning. Even in “Self-Portrait

with Bandaged Ear,” his necessary color washes in

despite greatcoat and pipe. Science has a word—

xanthopsia—for when objects appear

more yellow than they really are, but who’s

to say? As yellow as they are, they are.

POEMS
“The Dictionary”

by Charles Simic

Maybe there is a word in it somewhere

to describe the world this morning,

a word for the way the early light

takes delight in chasing the darkness

out of store windows and doorways.

Another word for the way it lingers

over a pair of wire-rimmed glasses

someone let drop on the sidewalk

last night and staggered off blindly

talking to himself or breaking into song.

POP NOTES
Hitting the Mark

by Ben Greenman

A new Mark Mulcahy solo album is an occasion, and not just because they’re fairly rare: the former leader of Miracle Legion has released only a handful of records since “Fathering,” back in 1997, and his last one, the striking “In Pursuit of Your Happiness,” came out in 2005. Since then, Mulcahy has been preoccupied with non-musical matters: his wife died in 2008, and he took time off to raise their twin daughters. Now he returns with “Dear Mark J. Mulcahy, I Love You” (Fire/Mezzotint), yet another feather in the cap of one of American music’s most deserving—and one of its most puzzlingly underappreciated—singer-songwriters.

Though the title suggests that this is a self-referential endeavor, maybe even a reflection on his own family tragedy, Mulcahy has been reluctant to identify the album as personal. But that does not make it any less potent. From the first song, “I Taketh Away,” Mulcahy’s dense, enigmatic lyrics jut out of his energetic, jangly arrangements like a series of punches: “You couldn’t tell them anything / They lived hard and they died hard / On all fours for everything / They kissed the ass that was presented.” Elsewhere, the record touches on greed and lust (“It all starts with the alphabet / A is for all I can get”); offers a nearly perfect distillation of disappointment (“I expected less and got even less”); and even takes a crack at theology (“I know you can do this / Now don’t be a Judas”). But Mulcahy’s dark world view does not interfere with his ability to consistently deliver moments of beauty, largely as a result of his superb singing: on “She Makes the World Turn Backwards,” he unleashes a range of vocal effects, from folkie simplicity to a tortured tremolo. And on “Bailing Out on Everything Again” he sounds like an American Morrissey, both vocally and philosophically (“It’s more than too late for me / Because I’ve fallen in love with things I hate”).

The songs are short and uniformly excellent, so it’s difficult to locate a focal point. Still, there’s a case to be made for “Let the Fireflies Fly Away,” a parable of human frailty seen through animal behavior that starts with a gentle guitar figure and a vaudeville joke. “Waiter,” Mulcahy says, “there’s a frog in my. . . ” But there’s not a frog in his soup, or his throat, for that matter; he soars over the crabbed, cramped world he describes, ending with the liberating metaphor of the title: “Open up the jar,” he sings in falsetto, “and let the fireflies fly away.” (Mulcahy comes to the Mercury Lounge on June 27.) ♦

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Out of Order

by Vince Aletti

Confronted with the wide-ranging responses to the end of analog photography, the curators of the International Center of Photography’s fourth Triennial exhibition considered calling the show “Chaos.” An element of disorder and confusion remains in what has since been titled “A Different Kind of Order,” but that’s exactly what makes this the museum’s most stimulating and successful Triennial yet. The curators, Carol Squiers, Christopher Phillips, Kristen Lubben, and Joanna Lehan (I had Lehan’s slot in 2009), have given the radically redesigned galleries over to an exhibition of photographs and videos that’s part fun house, part chamber of horrors—installations by A. K. Burns and Thomas Hirschhorn cover the extremes—with a deep foundation in photojournalism. Topics from global warming to living off the grid are seen from the inside out, in all their frustrating complexity. With work by Elliott Hundley, Sam Falls, Walid Raad, Wangechi Mutu, Nayland Blake, and Huma Bhabha, the show embraces photography as a medium in flux, one in which more chaos can only give way to more creativity. ♦

TABLES FOR TWO
Alder

157 Second Ave. (212-539-1900)

by Hannah Goldfield

“Nothing’s what it seems” is a guiding principle at the restaurants of Wylie Dufresne, the mad-scientist “Top Chef” Master behind the Lower East Side’s wd-50 and now Alder, a new “pub” in the East Village. At Alder, certain dishes express this maxim obviously, with scare quotes. The “potato chips” that accompany a wavelike smear of purple pub cheese (aged Cheddar, cream cheese, mustard, and port wine) are actually pieces of Martin’s potato bread, flattened and baked to a crunch; the “oyster crackers” that come with a decadent, silky clam chowder are real oysters, dehydrated and fried to a crackle. Other plates are just composed so artfully that their ingredients become unrecognizable, and you might have to ask the server to remind you what you ordered—as in the case of the foie-gras terrine, which comes embedded in a rind of poached apple to create what looks almost like a slice of grapefruit. Served atop chartreuse yogurt on an English muffin and jewelled with delicate herb leaves, it’s part breakfast sandwich, part elaborate pastry.

What’s most surprising, however, is not the big reveal—it’s that, by and large, these flashy, self-conscious innovations actually taste good, like real food. “Pigs in a blanket”—segments of Chinese sausage encased in crisp, compressed hot-dog bun and carefully arranged on a slab of slate alongside dots of spicy Japanese mustard and sweet-chili sauce—are as addictive as the original, but better, and manage to pay homage to the egg roll, too. Fried quail, which by some kitchen trick arrives in juicy, boneless coins marbled with fat, is perfectly offset by a mash of banana curry, dollops of pickled turmeric, and a single, elegant stalk of Chinese broccoli. Ethereally textured, pale-pink smoked Arctic char, served with al-dente berbere lentils, apricot, and Napa cabbage, will make you forget salmon ever existed.

Not every dish is a home run—the oxtail stew is surprisingly bland—and some choices are questionable. It’s unclear why, for example, a bowl of giardiniera appears on every table: there’s not a single thing on the menu that would benefit from it. And charging five dollars for “unlimited fizzy water” seems a bit inhospitable for a place that, despite its celebrity-chef allure and austere, gray-toned aesthetic, manages to feel pretty laid back and welcoming. But dessert is delightful—especially vanilla ice cream drizzled in red-pepper oil and a root-beer pudding that magically captures the flavor of float foam—and the drinks are genuinely unusual, a remarkable feat in this golden age of mixology. The St. Marks the Spot, a frothy orange mix of carrot juice, sea buckthorn, and aquavit, garnished with a birch-patterned cardboard straw, is as virtuous as a cocktail can get—in spite of the liquor, it tastes positively healthy. (Open daily for dinner. Dishes $9-$23.) ♦

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Capricious Bach

by Alex Ross

Hardly a month goes by without a new rendition of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos arriving in the virtual space where record stores used to be. A version by the Montreal-based group Ensemble Caprice, on the Analekta label, stands out not only for its fleet, characterful approach but also for its startling choice to intermingle Bach’s masterpieces with Baroque-style arrangements of seven preludes and fugues by Dmitri Shostakovich. These last are the work of the group’s leader, Matthias Maute, who finds fresh, vibrant colors in Shostakovich’s outwardly doleful music. There’s a strong philosophical point behind the endeavor, as Maute explains in the magazine Early Music America: given that we routinely adapt the music of the past for modern instruments, why not reverse the equation? As you listen, you imagine a time machine that has somehow transported Shostakovich’s Bachian pieces to the messy desk of Bach himself, who, puzzled but intrigued, tries them out with his orchestra in Cöthen. He likes what he hears. ♦

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Getting Psyched

by Richard Brody

Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller, “The Lodger,” from 1926, which he made at age twenty-six, set the template for his next fifty years of erotic mayhem. (It screens June 30 in BAM’s series of his nine surviving silent films.) As the London police search for a sex killer who targets blond-haired women, a furtive tenant in a rooming house arouses suspicion owing in part to his attention to the landlords’ blond daughter, a model. Hitchcock’s flamboyant visual imagination is already evident in such ingeniously crafted tricks as the filming of pacing feet overhead through a glass floor—and is already steeped in sex. Here, guilt and innocence are less a question of clean hands than of dirty minds. Closeups on a breakfast knife and a fireplace poker suggest an everyday blend of lust and violence; the protagonist, who shows up masked in cross-like shadows, endures a symbolic crucifixion as a result of his irrepressible desire; and an ecstatically choreographed kiss (of which the young Hitchcock was already the undisputed master) daringly combines romantic passion with the Passion. ♦

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
This Week

The Theatre

DEATH WATCH

Embalmers, cemetery tour guides, and self-proclaimed vampires are some of the real-life characters the Civilians interviewed for their latest theatre piece, “Be the Death of Me.” Steve Cosson directs, and has the audience moving from scene to scene within the Irondale Center, originally a church.

Night Life

THE MUSICAL CURE

Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino is an ecstatic folk-revivalist ensemble from Lecce, Italy, featuring six musicians and a dancer. It specializes in taranta music, which traces its roots back to the sixth century and is meant to drive dancers into a trancelike state to excise the poisonous bite of a tarantula. The group drops in on Joe’s Pub this week.

Art

PUBLIC INTEREST

The Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Gramsci Monument” is a pavilion at the Forest Houses in the Bronx, built in collaboration with its residents and produced by the Dia Art Foundation. The piece, which involves a library, a workshop, a stage, and a lounge, is named for the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who was incarcerated by the Fascists for his Marxist beliefs.

Dance

KISS OF LIFE

The director Doug Fitch, who last teamed up with the New York Philharmonic for the magical “Cunning Little Vixen” in 2011, now applies his mix of puppetry, video, and dance to Stravinsky’s “The Fairy’s Kiss” and “Petrushka.” Called “A Dancer’s Dream,” the double bill stars a dream of a dancer, New York City Ballet’s Sara Mearns.

Classical Music

BRASS BLAST

In the past few years, a number of New York brass players have built upon their backgrounds in Bruckner, jazz, and band music to perform innovative pieces in a muscular chamber style. TILT Brass, always fun and forward-looking, offers a tenth-anniversary concert this week.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
The Theatre

OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS

Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information.

BE THE DEATH OF ME

In their latest theatre-installation piece, the Civilians explore death, using text from interviews with nurses, funeral directors, shamans, crime-scene cleaners, and other experts. Steve Cosson directs. June 28-29. (Irondale Center, 85 S. Oxford St., Brooklyn. 718-488-9233.)

CHOIR BOY

Trip Cullman directs this new play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, about a boy who wants to become the leader of the gospel choir at his prep school. In previews. Opens July 2. (City Center Stage II, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212.)

THE DESIGNATED MOURNER

Andre Gregory directs the 1996 play by Wallace Shawn, in which three artists lament the fate of the increasingly conservative policies of their country. The play, starring Deborah Eisenberg, Larry Pine, and Shawn himself, is part of the Wallace Shawn–Andre Gregory Project, co-presented by Theatre for a New Audience and the Public. In previews. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.)

ICE FACTORY 2013

The annual festival kicks off with the Assembly’s production of “That Poor Dream” (June 26-29), which explores class disparity on the Metro-North. Written by Stephen Aubrey and directed by Jess Chayes. (New Ohio Theatre, 154 Christopher St. 888-596-1027.)

ISOLDE

As part of the River to River Festival, New York City Players open their studio for a work-in-progress showing of a new play written and directed by Richard Maxwell, about an actress who is unable to remember her lines. June 30. (LMCC Studios, One Liberty Plaza, 12th fl. 212-219-9401.)

NOBODY LOVES YOU

Second Stage concludes its season with the New York première of a musical comedy about a philosophy graduate student who ends up as the star of a reality-TV dating show. With music and lyrics by Gaby Alter and a book and lyrics by Itamar Moses. Michelle Tattenbaum directs. In previews. (305 W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422.)

THE UNAVOIDABLE DISAPPEARANCE OF TOM DURNIN

In this world première by Steven Levenson, presented by Roundabout Theatre Company, a man recently released from jail struggles to readapt to society. Starring Christopher Denham, Sarah Goldberg, Lisa Emery, Rich Sommer, and David Morse; Scott Ellis directs. In previews. Opens June 27. (Laura Pels, 111 W. 46th St. 212-719-1300.)

NOW PLAYING

BUYER & CELLAR

Jonathan Tolins’s comedy, starring Michael Urie and directed by Stephen Brackett, about a young man who works in the basement of Barbra Streisand’s Malibu home, transfers to the Barrow Street Theatre. (27 Barrow St. 212-868-4444.)

CHARLES IVES TAKE ME HOME

Honest, vulgar, funny, and smart, Laura Starr (Kate Nowlin) addresses her young basketball team in her first halftime as coach. Her father, John (Drew McVety), meanwhile, tells the audience his own story, that of an accomplished violinist with serious professional and personal regrets. Another character in this complex, engaging play, by Jessica Dickey, is the composer Charles Ives (Henry Stram), John’s musical and spiritual hero. John and Charles not only engage in philosophical debate but also play piano-violin duets, splendidly; these scenes are intercut with glimpses of Laura and John’s troubled relationship through the years. Like an Ives sonata—sometimes jagged, sometimes lyrical—the play, as directed by Daniella Topol, is an accomplished, affecting composition. (Rattlestick, 224 Waverly Pl. 866-811-4111. Through June 29.)

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

Daniel Sullivan directs the Shakespeare comedy, starring Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Hamish Linklater, as part of the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park. (Reviewed in this issue.) (Delacorte, Central Park. Enter at 81st St. at Central Park W. 212-967-7555. Through June 30.)

CORNELIUS

As part of “Brits Off Broadway,” 59E59 presents J. B. Priestley’s 1935 play in a production from the fine British company Finborough Theatre. Jim Cornelius (Alan Cox) is a partner in the “aluminium”-importing firm of Briggs & Murrison, and business is not good. In this very English, between-the-wars precursor of sorts to “Glengarry Glen Ross,” the employees do their best to carry on amid economic realities, personal tensions, and an atmosphere in which the hard “twisters” will have it over the gentlemen every time. Cornelius is the buoyant center of attention, striving to put the best face on a worsening situation, hoping that Bob Murrison, his savvy partner, on an emergency tour of clients in the Midlands, will return with a miracle in time to stave off the creditors. As directed by Sam Yates, Cox plays Cornelius as stolidly good-humored and warm-hearted, but it’s Jamie Newall’s spectacular turn, as Murrison, that shifts the play’s focus from an economic crisis to an existential one. (59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200. Through June 30.)

THE EXPLORERS CLUB

Is this what happens when Americans attempt to write British farce? Nell Benjamin’s new comedy is set in London, in a Victorian clubhouse, where gentlemen discuss exotic climes over brandy and cigars. When a prim female adventurer, Phyllida Spotte-Hume (Jennifer Westfeldt), enters their midst, dragging along a tribesman from the lost city of Pahatlabong, naturally the men scoff at her bid for membership, if not her imperialism. Things get wacky fast: the “savage” slaps the Queen; England declares war on Pahatlabong; and Phyllida’s twin sister arrives, causing confusion. Marc Bruni’s production never reaches a fizzy frenzy, and the script could use a rewrite by Alan Bennett. There are, however, moments of dazzling slapstick, most of them performed by Lorenzo Pisoni, as a bumbling botanist. (City Center Stage I, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212.)

FAR FROM HEAVEN

This latest work by the composer Scott Frankel and the lyricist Michael Korie is a problem musical, a genteel contrivance wrapped in “issues”—racism, homophobia, misogyny—that limit the show, even as they are intended to expand, and then blow, our minds. It’s based on the 2002 movie of the same title, written and directed by Todd Haynes, and the book, by Richard Greenberg, is deeply faithful to the original tale. Cathy Whitaker (Kelli O’Hara) is a red-haired, thirtyish housewife who lives in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1957. After she discovers her husband, Frank (Steven Pasquale), in the embrace of another man, she develops a relationship with Raymond Deagan (Isaiah Johnson), who is black, and the son of her former gardener. When O’Hara’s Cathy looks at Raymond and sees something of herself in him, we believe her. But even a performer as porous as O’Hara can’t play what isn’t there, and what is there is a pastiche. (Reviewed in our issue of 6/24/13.) (Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.)

A KID LIKE JAKE

Daniel Pearle’s astute drama is about Manhattan private-elementary-school admissions, a subject so primal for New York audiences that it seems like pandering. Alex (Carla Gugino) and Greg (Peter Grosz), a reasonably high-strung couple, are trying to get their four-year-old son, Jake, into kindergarten. Judy (the warm Caroline Aaron), the director of Jake’s preschool, has noticed his interest in “gender-variant play”—he’s obsessed with Cinderella—and suggests that they emphasize this in applications. For a while, it seems like Pearle is simply poking at yuppie anxieties, but the play, well directed by Evan Cabnet for LCT3, builds into a gripping dissection of modern parenting. With potent performances by Gugino and Grosz, as well-meaning people whose marriage and morals are under strain. (Claire Tow, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200.)

RANTOUL AND DIE

The Amoralists present the New York première of a play by Mark Roberts, about a couple whose marriage has hit the rocks. (Cherry Lane, 38 Commerce St. 866-811-4111.)

THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY

Amanda Plummer and Brad Dourif star in this play by Tennessee Williams, directed by Gene David Kirk. (Reviewed in this issue.) (New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St. 212-239-6200.)

OUT OF TOWN

BARRINGTON STAGE COMPANY

On the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage, John Rando directs the musical “On the Town,” with music by Leonard Bernstein and a book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. On the St. Germain Stage, Giovanna Sardelli directs “Muckrakers,” by Zayd Dohrn. (30 Union St., Pittsfield, Mass. 413-236-8888.)

HUDSON VALLEY SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL

The summer’s offerings include “All’s Well That Ends Well,” “King Lear,” and Ken Ludwig’s adaptation of the Dumas novel “The Three Musketeers.” (Garrison, N.Y. 845-265-9575.)

POWERHOUSE THEATRE

Vassar and New York Stage and Film’s annual summer festival begins with “Downtown Race Riot” (June 26-July 7), a comedy by Seth Zvi Rosenfeld, set in Washington Square Park. Scott Elliott directs. (Powerhouse, 124 Raymond Ave., Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 845-437-5599.)

ALSO PLAYING

THE ASSEMBLED PARTIES: Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200. I’LL EAT YOU LAST: A CHAT WITH SUE MENGERS: Booth, 222 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. Through June 30. KINKY BOOTS: Hirschfeld, 302 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. LUCKY GUY: Broadhurst, 235 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. MATILDA THE MUSICAL: Shubert, 225 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812: Kazino, W. 13th St. at Washington St. 866-811-4111. A PICTURE OF AUTUMN: Mint, 311 W. 43rd St. 866-811-4111. PIPPIN: Music Box, 239 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. REASONS TO BE HAPPY: Lucille Lortel, 121 Christopher St. 212-352-3101. Through June 29. RODGERS + HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA: Broadway Theatre, Broadway at 53rd St. 212-239-6200. SONTAG: REBORN: New York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. 212-279-4200. Through June 30. 3 KINDS OF EXILE: Atlantic Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th St. 866-811-4111. THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL: Stephen Sondheim, 124 W. 43rd St. 212-239-6200. VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE: Golden, 252 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. VENICE: Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. Through June 30. THE WEIR: Irish Repertory, 132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Night Life

ROCK AND POP

Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements.

BAM’S HOWARD GILMAN OPERA HOUSE

30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100)—June 26: “Kate’s Kids,” a tribute to the Canadian folksinger Kate McGarrigle (1946-2010), features the music of her children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, along with performances by Norah Jones, Emmylou Harris, Mark Ronson, and others. The show benefits sarcoma research.

BEACON THEATRE

Broadway at 74th St. (212-465-6500)—June 27: After a pretty successful run with Humble Pie, the guitarist Peter Frampton exploded in 1976 with the release of “Frampton Comes Alive!,” one of the most successful live albums of all time, featuring a gaggle of hit singles and the “talk box” effect that mixed his vocals with guitar tone. This tour, Frampton’s Guitar Circus, promises special guests with effects of their own.

BOWERY BALLROOM

6 Delancey St. (212-533-2111)—June 27: Bronze Radio Return. On its latest album, “Up, On & Over,” the Hartford, Connecticut, sextet turns out rootsy folk rock that calls for hand clapping, foot stomping, and hearty singing along. The Stillwater, Oklahoma, foursome Taddy Porter opens with raucous and bluesy rock. June 28: Come. The nineties college-rock heroes are back, in support of the rerelease of their 1992 début album, “11:11,” in which Thalia Zedek’s plaintive vocals wrestle with drumming that erupts suddenly from stretches of sludgy, bluesy guitar strumming. With Jennifer O’Connor, a former labelmate, and her introspective folk rock.

BROOKLYN BOWL

61 Wythe Ave., Williamsburg (718-963-3369)—June 27-29: The Old 97’s front man, Rhett Miller, has recovered from what he described on Twitter in April as “full-blown hemorrhaged vocal cords,” and the alt-country-rock mainstays are in town for a three-night stand. For each show, the Dallas act will be playing one of its first three albums from beginning to end, starting on the first night with “Hitchhike to Rhome,” continuing with “Wreck Your Life,” and finishing with “Too Far to Care.”

CELEBRATE BROOKLYN!

Prospect Park Bandshell, Prospect Park W. at 9th St. (718-683-5600)—June 29: The tropicália legends Os Mutantes began as a trio in São Paulo in the mid-sixties and were central to that movement’s 1968 sonic manifesto, the compilation album “Tropicália: Ou Panis et Circencis.” The group, which mixed Beatle-esque psychedelic rock with bossa nova and other indigenous Brazilian musical forms, broke up in the late seventies, but it re-formed in 2006 under the leadership of Sérgio Dias, its exquisite guitar player and now sole original member. While its new record, “Fool Metal Jack,” includes musical digressions into reggae, heavy metal, and other genres, the album’s best songs are rooted in the heterodox and playful Brazilian-rock sound that it helped pioneer forty-five years ago.

4 KNOTS MUSIC FESTIVAL

The Village Voice takes over the South Street Seaport on June 29, from 1 to 8, for this annual summer gathering, which rose from the ashes of Coney Island’s now-defunct Siren Festival. While the current festival may not have Nathan’s hot dogs and free-refill piña coladas, it also lacks the blinding sandstorms, and, for many, a long subway ride home. This year’s lineup features a nice cross-section of the current crop of indie-rock upstarts, including the Vancouver punks White Lung, Brooklyn’s Parquet Courts, and the headliner, Kurt Vile and the Violators. (Pier 17, on the East River.)

GLASSLANDS GALLERY

289 Kent Ave., between S. 1st and S. 2nd Sts., Brooklyn (No phone)—June 29: Eraas. Last year, this Brooklyn duo plunged into the deep end of atmospheric post-punk and rotted, murky goth on its self-titled début. The album was recorded in a mansion in Western Massachusetts, and is driven by stumbling rhythms and the pair’s whining, haunting vocals.

HIGHLINE BALLROOM

431 W. 16th St. (212-414-5994)—June 29: Garland Jeffreys, one of the city’s rock-and-roll treasures, celebrates his seventieth birthday. Those who saw his show in January, when Jeffreys led his killer band in material old and new and climbed on tables throughout the club, know that this will not be a chamber recital.

IRVING PLAZA

17 Irving Pl. (212-777-6800)—June 30: Fitz and the Tantrums deliver exhilarating eighties-influenced synth-pop that, even in its mawkish moments, is irresistibly fun. The actress, model, and singer-songwriter Ivy Levan supports with the sassy, brassy pop she calls “swamp-hop.”

JOE’S PUB

425 Lafayette St. (212-539-8778)—June 27: Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino specializes in the taranta music and dance of the Salento province (the heel in Italy’s geographic boot). The group, which has few peers in contemporary world music, began in the mid-seventies under the musical leadership of the renowned Italian guitarist Daniele Durante, and is now led by his equally gifted son, Mauro, a violinist and percussionist.

MERCURY LOUNGE

217 E. Houston St. (212-260-4700)—June 27: Mark Mulcahy, the former Miracle Legion front man, returns with “Dear Mark J. Mulcahy, I Love You,” his first solo record in seven years (see Pop Notes).

MUSIC HALL OF WILLIAMSBURG

66 N. 6th St., Brooklyn (718-486-5400)—June 29: Lil B. The young Berkeley, California, rap artist, who has vowed to wear the same pair of Vans sneakers until he’s made a million dollars, already has more than eighty-seven million YouTube video views, and he’s bound to have a million followers on Twitter soon. But his delivery style is not that of a man on a mission; it’s relaxed, allowing listeners to fully absorb each lyric whether it makes sense or not.

(LE) POISSON ROUGE

158 Bleecker St. (212-505-3474)—July 1: The all-black Detroit trio Death was omitted from the official history of punk rock until very recently, but the release, four years ago, of its raw and angular 1974 recordings, under the title “. . . For the Whole World to See,” complicates the genre’s authorized time line. As teen-agers in the early seventies, the three brothers in the band, Bobby, David, and Dannis Hackney, switched from playing R. & B. and funk to cranking out hard-driving, politically aware songs that built on the music of Michigan proto-punk legends the MC5 and the Stooges. The band’s forward-thinking sound was particularly noticeable in David Hackney’s vocals, which presaged by several years the staccato, rapid-fire delivery used at times by Bad Brains’ lead singer, HR. Discouraged by the negative reaction to their name, the brothers folded the band around 1976. They started making gospel-rock records as the 4th Movement, and they relocated to Vermont, where Death’s visionary tapes were stored. David died in 2000; Bobbie Duncan, an R. & B. session guitarist and friend of the family, fills in for him. A new documentary about the group, “A Band Called Death,” detailing its fascinating and curious history, plays this week at Cinema Village.

RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL

July 2: The drummer turned accordionist Jeffery Broussard and his Creole Cowboys bring their soulful take on classic zydeco outdoors, to Brookfield Place Plaza, for a late-afternoon show. Also on July 2: Pedrito Martinez, the Cuban-born singer and percussionist, a regular at the club Guantanamera, where he often escorts the crowd to dance heaven, works his magic in the early evening at Rockefeller Park. (rivertorivernyc.com.)

SAINT VITUS

1120 Manhattan Ave., Brooklyn (No phone)—July 2: The San Francisco quartet Deafheaven has been described as playing shoegaze, black metal, and post-rock, but what those genre tags don’t indicate is the profound vision that the group has displayed on its second album, “Sunbather.” The songs are progressive, melancholy, and jaw-clenchingly brutal, tapping into a wellspring of possibility that lies within each of those genres.

SUMMERSTAGE

Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, mid-Park at 69th St. (212-360-2777)—June 30: “Big Star’s Third” celebrates the sprawling third album of the famed power-pop band. Founded in the early seventies by Alex Chilton (the former teen-age singer in the Box Tops, best known for “Cry Like a Baby” and “The Letter”) and Chris Bell, the band was short-lived, but it was adored by later musicians and influential in many ways. (Cheap Trick, for example, covered its song “In the Streets” for the opening credits of “That ’70s Show.”) Here, Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Marshall Crenshaw, Pete Yorn, Mike Mills, Chris Stamey, and many others, along with a twenty-piece chamber orchestra, give it its due.

285 KENT

285 Kent Ave., Brooklyn (No phone)—June 29: Boyd Rice, an artist, photographer, experimental noise pioneer, and contributor to Modern Drunkard magazine, has courted controversy throughout his nearly forty-year career. While producing extremely challenging sound art with his longtime group NON, Rice has made a point of alienating as many people as possible; he regularly performs in full Fascist gear and has collaborated with known white supremacists. He’s here with Cold Cave, whose front man, Wes Eisold, has been his staunch supporter. He published Rice’s recent memoir through his publishing imprint, Heartworm Press, and collaborated with him on NON’s newest record, “Back to Mono.”

JAZZ AND STANDARDS

BIRDLAND

315 W. 44th St. (212-581-3080)—The guitarist Samson Schmitt, the accordionist Ludovic Beier, and the violinist Pierre Blanchard are fleet-fingered European players who worship at the shrine of the majestic Belgian Gypsy master Django Reinhardt. They are in town June 25-30, joined each night by guest jazz soloists. A highlight will be the sets featuring the clarinet virtuoso Anat Cohen, on June 28th.

BLUE NOTE

131 W. 3rd St. (212-475-8592)—June 27-29: Roy Haynes has played with nearly everyone who’s anyone in jazz, from Lester Young and Charlie Parker to Chick Corea and Pat Metheny. The strength and length of that list is rivalled only by the eighty-eight-year-old drummer’s energy and commitment to continued playing. He shows no signs of slowing down, and often surrounds himself with younger players in his Fountain of Youth Band.

BLUE NOTE JAZZ FESTIVAL

The annual summer festival comes to a close this week, with shows at its namesake club and around town. A highlight of the gathering, taking place at Town Hall on June 28, amounts to a mini-festival in itself. It is a not-to-be-missed triple bill celebrating Wayne Shorter’s eightieth birthday. It features his quartet, the ACS trio with Geri Allen, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Esperanza Spalding, and the Dave Douglas–Joe Lovano quintet. The evening is bursting with veterans and exciting younger talents, forward thinkers all. (bluenotejazzfestival.com. Through June 30.)

CAFÉ CARLYLE

Carlyle Hotel, Madison Ave. at 76th St. (212-744-1600)—June 25-29: John Lloyd Young, a 2006 Tony Award winner for his role as the Four Seasons’ lead singer, Frankie Valli, in the musical “Jersey Boys.”

CORNELIA STREET CAFÉ

29 Cornelia St. (212-989-9319)—June 30: Eri Yamamoto, an engrossing pianist and composer who has too long been under the radar, celebrates her album “Firefly” with her trio.

54 BELOW

254 W. 54th St. (646-476-3551)—June 25: The singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, who was born in Miami to a French mother and a Haitian father, is poised for stardom. Her impressive début album, “WomanChild,” deftly and imaginatively revitalizes all manner of standards and also delivers a taste of clever original compositions. She celebrates its release here, with Aaron Diehl (on piano), Paul Sikivie (on bass), and Rodney Green (on drums).

IRIDIUM

1650 Broadway, at 51st St. (212-582-2121)—June 29: Wayne Krantz, a much-admired fusion guitarist with prodigious chops and a boundless imagination, leads a trio.

JAZZ STANDARD

116 E. 27th St. (212-576-2232)—June 27-30: The South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela reunites with the respected pianist Larry Willis, with whom he worked in the mid-sixties.

THE KITANO NEW YORK

66 Park Ave., at 38th St. (212-885-7119)—June 28-29: Fred Hersch, a poetic pianist and a grand champion of the jazz-duo setting, meets up with the resourceful trumpeter Ralph Alessi, with whom he recorded the new album “Only Many.”

MIDSUMMER NIGHT SWING

The twenty-fifth-anniversary season continues with Vince Giordano & the Nighthawks on July 1. As always, there are dance instructors on hand. (Damrosch Park, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza. 212-721-6500. Through July 13.)

ROULETTE

509 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn (917-267-0363)—June 30: The Seattle-based guitarist and composer Bill Horvitz has assembled an eighteen-piece ensemble to celebrate the release of his new album, “The Long Walk.” The evening brings together some of the brightest names of the downtown music scene of the nineties, including Bobby Previte, Marty Ehrlich, and Bill’s brother Wayne.

THE STONE

Avenue C at 2nd St. (No phone)—June 25-30: The experimental harpist Zeena Parkins, one of the most compelling performers in the downtown music community, settles in for a weeklong residency. Parkins, who has backed Björk, will be showcasing a diverse array of her musical interests, including, on June 25, an improvisational duet with the virtuosic avant-metal guitarist Mick Barr, and, on June 27, Phantom Orchard, her long-standing collaboration with the drummer and electronica pioneer Ikue Mori, joined on this occasion by the tuba player Marcus Rojas. On June 30, she joins a ten-piece ensemble to perform “Lace Piece,” a graphic score she composed, inspired by pieces of lace collected from around the world.

VILLAGE VANGUARD

178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. (212-255-4037)—June 25-July 7: The rip-roaring neo-hard-bop trumpeter Roy Hargrove and his quintet settle in for a two-week engagement.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Art

MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“The Civil War and American Art.” Through Sept. 2. |  “Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective.” Through Sept. 22. |  “Photography and the American Civil War.” Through Sept. 2. |  “Punk: Chaos to Couture.” Through Aug. 14. |  “The Roof Garden Commission: Imran Qureshi.” Through Nov. 13. |  “The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: Charting a New Empire.” Through Aug. 4. (Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 9:30 to 5:30, and Friday and Saturday evenings until 9.)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9400)—“Claes Oldenburg: The Street and the Store/Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing.” Through Aug. 5. |  “Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes.” Through Sept. 23. |  “Bill Brandt: Shadows and Light.” Through Aug. 12. |  “XL: 19 New Acquisitions in Photography.” Through Jan. 6. |  “Rain Room.” Through July 28. (Open daily, 10:30 to 5:30, and Friday evenings until 8.)

MOMA PS1

22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens (718-784-2084)—“Expo 1: New York.” Through Sept. 2. (Open Thursdays through Mondays, noon to 6.)

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 89th St. (212-423-3500)—“James Turrell.” Through Sept. 25. |  “New Harmony: Abstraction Between the Wars, 1919-1939.” Through Sept. 8. (Open Fridays through Wednesdays, 10 to 5:45, and Saturday evenings until 7:45.)

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

Madison Ave. at 75th St. (212-570-3600)—“Hopper Drawing.” Through Oct. 6. |  “Stewart Uoo and Jana Euler: Outside Inside Sensibility.” Through July 10. |  “David Hockney: The Jugglers.” Through Sept. 1. |  “Robert Irwin: Scrim Veil—Black Rectangle—Natural Light (1977).” Opens June 27. (Open Wednesdays, Thursdays, and weekends, 11 to 6, and Fridays, 1 to 9.)

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

200 Eastern Parkway (718-638-5000)—“Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui.” Through Aug. 4. |  “The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001-2103.” Opens June 28. |  “John Singer Sargent Watercolors.” Through July 28. |  “Valerie Hegarty: Alternative Histories.” Through Dec. 1. (Open Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Thursday evenings until 10.)

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Central Park W. at 79th St. (212-769-5100)—“Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture.” Through Aug. 11. |  “Whales: Giants of the Deep.” Through Jan. 5. (Open daily, 10 to 5:45.)

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Columbus Ave. at 66th St. (212-595-9533)—“Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.” Through Sept. 22. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 7:30, and Sundays, noon to 6.)

BRONX MUSEUM

1040 Grand Concourse (718-681-6000)—“State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970.” Through Sept. 8. (Open Thursdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Friday evenings until 8.)

DIA ART FOUNDATION AT THE FOREST HOUSES

Tinton Ave., between 163rd St. and 165th St., the Bronx (212-989-5566)—“Thomas Hirschhorn: Gramsci Monument.” Opens July 1. (Open daily, 10 to 6.)

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

1133 Sixth Ave., at 43rd St. (212-857-0000)—“A Different Kind of Order: The I.C.P. Triennial.” Through Sept. 8. (Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 to 6, and Friday evenings until 8.)

JEWISH MUSEUM

Fifth Ave. at 92nd St. (212-423-3200)—“As It Were . . . So to Speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom.” Through Aug. 4. |  “Six Things: Sagmeister & Walsh.” Through Aug. 4. |  “Jack Goldstein x 10,000.” Through Sept. 29. (Open Saturdays through Tuesdays, 11 to 5:45, Thursdays, 11 to 8, and Fridays, 11 to 4.)

MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM

225 Madison Ave., at 36th St. (212-685-0008)—“Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney.” Through Sept. 2. (Open Tuesdays through Thursdays, 10:30 to 5, Fridays, 10:30 to 9, Saturdays, 10 to 6, and Sundays, 11 to 6.)

NEW MUSEUM

235 Bowery, at Prince St. (212-219-1222)—“Llyn Foulkes.” Through Sept. 1. |  “Erika Vogt: Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll.” Through Sept. 22. |  “Ellen Gallagher: Don’t Axe Me.” Through Sept. 15. (Open Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Thursday evenings until 9.)

STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM

144 W. 125th St. (212-864-4500)—“David Hartt.” Through June 30. |  “Fred Wilson: Local Color.” Through June 30. |  “Ayé A. Aton: Space-Time Continuum.” Through June 30. |  “Mendi and Keith Obadike: American Cypher.” Through June 30. (Open Thursdays and Fridays, noon to 9, Saturdays, 10 to 6, and Sundays, noon to 6.)

GALLERIES—UPTOWN

“1963” / “BRUCE DAVIDSON: TIME OF CHANGE”

The main event here is a shrewd photographic survey of a pivotal year in American history, with particular focus on the civil-rights movement (seen primarily through Bob Adelman’s lens) and the Kennedy assassination. Vietnam gets a footnote, as do Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and the heavyweight contender then known as Cassius Clay. Pictures in an adjacent gallery, by Davidson, treat the civil-rights struggle in depth, with a broad range of his strong work from the sixties covering demonstrations in the South, along with less contentious but no less charged moments in Harlem, Chicago, and the cotton fields of South Carolina. Through July 6. (Greenberg, 41 E. 57th St. 212-334-0010.)

Short List

JOHN BALDESSARI: Marian Goodman, 24 W. 57th St. 212-977-7160. Opens June 27. ALFRED GESCHEIDT: Higher Pictures, 980 Madison Ave., at 76th St. 212-249-6100. Through July 19. PAUL MCCARTHY: Park Avenue Armory, Park Ave. at 66th St. 212-933-5812. Through Aug. 4. “404 E. 14TH”: De Nagy, 724 Fifth Ave., at 57th St. 212-262-5050. Through Aug. 2.

GALLERIES—CHELSEA

SUSAN BEE

These thirty midsize canvases, inspired by the format of film stills, might best be described as workmanlike, but Bee’s skills as a colorist and her stylistic abandon make the show worth seeking out. Flat figures are outlined in black, as if in the pages of coloring books, offset by bright backgrounds that loosely reference modernist painting (Pollock-like dribbles, Mondrian-esque geometries). In one picture, two long-haired young women cower in a backseat as bright daubs of abstraction fill the rear window. It’s horror vacui by way of film noir. Through June 29. (Accola Griefen, 547 W. 27th St. 646-532-3488.)

TIM HAWKINSON

The L.A. artist aims so hard to please—his new sculptures are named after Girl Scout cookies, for crying out loud—that it’s tempting to write off his art as gimcrackery. Don’t. In his adroit hands, palm fronds become a giant helmet-headed bird man balancing on an extravagant tail. Resin casts of the artist’s knuckles become the building blocks for a delicate sea horse. Hawkinson is not necessarily humble about his skills: a bronze self-portrait of the artist in chains is a nod to Houdini. Through June 29. (Pace, 508 W. 25th St. 212-255-4044.)

RICHARD MISRACH

The prolific photographer returns to a balcony over the same Hawaiian beach that was the site of his 2004 series of swimmers and sunbathers, but with far less dazzling results. Working on a grand scale, Misrach makes pictures that look like movie screens, minus genuinely cinematic action. A woman does a handstand on a surfboard; a swimmer churns toward shore; a couple embrace in hip-deep waters. On the beach, small, isolated figures laze in the center of otherwise deserted stretches of sand. The emptiness of these scenes is distractingly artificial, and overhead views of the ocean’s roiling waters look like studies for expensive wallpaper. Through June 29. (Pace, 510 W. 25th St. 212-255-4044.)

ARNE SVENSON

Following projects involving stray cats, sock monkeys, and forensic models, the New York photographer takes up human subjects; it’s his best work yet, but also his most controversial. Using a telephoto lens designed for birdwatchers, Svenson peers into the windows of his neighbors across the street. What he captures is fragmentary but intriguing: a man napping on a daybed, a woman kneeling to clean the floor, a couple at their breakfast table. Although people’s faces are almost always turned away, and their identities thus obscured, their postures and gestures remain telling, even titillating. Yet, while Svenson’s neighbors reportedly feel that their privacy was invaded by the artist’s surveillance, his artful glimpses of urban life are too discreet to be voyeuristic. Through June 29. (Saul, 535 W. 22nd St. 212-627-2410.)

“NYC C. 1985”

Nan Goldin and Larry Clark are the stars of this show, which depicts New York in a time of high anxiety and creative ferment, but they’ve got plenty of competition. Jeannette Montgomery Barron’s grid of black-and-white portraits of art stars on the rise includes Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, and Brice Marden; Amy Arbus and Janette Beckman similarly catch Madonna and Run-DMC early in their careers. But Andrew Garn, Christine Osinski, Keizo Kitajima, and Gunar Roze capture the period’s grit and flash just as vividly with a more anonymous cast, and Les Simpson’s video slideshow of club kids and drag divas is a crash course in wild style. Through July 3. (ClampArt, 531 W. 25th St. 646-230-0020.)

Short List

FRANCIS UPRITCHARD: Kern, 532 W. 20th St. 212-367-9663. Opens June 27. JANE AND LOUISE WILSON: 303 Gallery, 507 W. 24th St. 212-255-1121. Through Aug. 3. “AMBIENT”: Bonakdar, 521 W. 21st St. 212-414-4144. Through July 26. “FREAK OUT”: Greene Naftali, 508 W. 26th St. 212-463-7770. Opens June 27. “MIXED MESSAGE MEDIA“: Gladstone, 515 W. 24th St. 212-206-9300. Through Aug. 2. “SPECIFIC OBJECTS”: Inglett, 522 W. 24th St. 212-647-9111. Through July 26.

GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN

“LAUGHTER”

This winning group show, organized by Kari Cwynar, comes with a laugh track—a striking audio piece by Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, in which twenty-five speakers emit sounds ranging from chuckles to hysterics. The piece was inspired by the so-called “laughter epidemic” that struck Tanzania in 1962, the year the country gained independence, and it sets the tone for this show, which is darker than it is comic. For the Mexican workers seen in Yoshua Okón’s 2009 video, laughter is all in a day’s work: they’re seen laughing on cue in a recording studio, then packaging the results. There is one genuinely silly work here, a group of collages by Stuart Ringholt in which the naughty bits of nude male figures are obscured with inanimate objects. Through July 27. (Apexart, 291 Church St. 212-431-5270.)

Short List

JIMMY DE SANA: Salon 94 Bowery, 243 Bowery, at Stanton St. 212-979-0001. Through Aug. 9. “A BROKEN INHERITANCE”: Clifton Benevento, 515 Broadway, at Spring St. 212-431-6325. Through Aug. 2. “OLD BLACK”: Team, 47 Wooster St. 212-279-9219. Through July 26. “KEN PRICE: SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE RACE”: The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster St. 212-219-2166. Through Aug. 18.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Dance

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE

Frederick Ashton’s delightful “Sylvia” returns to the repertory. The story, drawn from a sixteenth-century Italian play, follows a nymph who is struck by Eros’s arrow and falls in love with a beautiful shepherd. The music, by Delibes, is considered one of the first great ballet scores; Tchaikovsky thought it finer than his own “Swan Lake.” The plum role of Sylvia—at first brash and strong, then tender—is best danced by Gillian Murphy, an English-born ballerina with crystalline technique; she performs on June 24 and the matinée of June 29. Other promising pairings include Veronika Part and Cory Stearns and the newly matched Natalia Osipova and Herman Cornejo. | June 24-25 and June 27-28 at 7:30, June 26 at 2 and 7:30, and June 29 at 2 and 8: “Sylvia.” (Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center. 212-362-6000. Through July 6.)

YANIRA CASTRO/A CANARY TORSI

“The People to Come” begins with the public, which is asked to submit photographs, sketches, and tasks, either in person or via the project’s Web site (www.thepeopletocome.org). At each four-hour performance, five dancers choreograph and then perform nineteen-minute solos based on those submissions. Viewers are encouraged to roam or come and go as the creative process is laid bare. (Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen St., Brooklyn. 347-560-3641. June 25-29 from 6 to 10.)

LA MAMA MOVES!

The monthlong festival continues with the final performances of Pavel Zustiak’s four-hour “Painted Bird Trilogy.” In a separate event, Oren Barnoy’s “Angels at the Club,” a trio set to dubstep and house music, shares a program with “[Bodied],” in which Wendell Cooper uses urban dance, rap, video, stilettos, and bondage gear to inhabit different personae. (74A E. 4th St. 212-475-7710. Zustiak: June 26-27 and June 29 at 7 and June 30 at 3. Barnoy: June 28-29 at 10 and June 30 at 5:30.)

RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL / THIRD RAIL PROJECTS

From the creators of “Then She Fell,” in which spectators are guided through an abandoned hospital, comes “Roadside Attraction,” a dance-theatre show located in a pop-up camper and spilling out onto lawn chairs and a picnic table outside. The production depicts the frustrations and fantasies of a family on vacation in the nineteen-seventies. (Brookfield Place, 220 Vesey St. 212-417-7000. June 27 at 1 and 7. One New York Plaza. July 1-2 at 12:30.)

BODYSTORIES: TERESA FELLION DANCE

In “Mantises Are Flipping,” the dancers move idiosyncratically and vocalize in close interaction with the odd percussion of Ryan Edwards’s score, played live. In “Control Dominion,” the choreography is mechanical and manic, using push-pull partnering and ensemble synchronicity to convey a struggle between individual will and groupthink. (Center for Performance Research, 361 Manhattan Ave. 718-349-1210. June 27 and June 29 at 7:30.)

“A DANCER’S DREAM”

Amid the fanciful costumes, miniature sets, puppets, and video both pre-recorded and live in this production by the New York Philharmonic and Giants Are Small, dance may be only one element among many. Yet the dancer who dreams through Stravinsky’s ballets “The Fairy’s Kiss” and “Petrushka” is one of New York’s greatest ballerinas, Sara Mearns. The choreography is by Karole Armitage. (Avery Fisher Hall, 10 Lincoln Center Plaza. 212-721-6500. June 27 at 7:30 and June 28-29 at 8.)

AMANDA SELWYN DANCE THEATRE

Selwyn’s dances tend to rely on a theme; her latest, an evening-length work titled “It’s a Game,” derives its inspiration from the game of chess. Through her sculptural, highly physical movement, she explores the inherent dramas—power, strategy, competition—of intellectual play. (New York Live Arts, 219 W. 19th St. 212-924-0077. June 27-29 at 7:30.)

LES BALLETS TROCKADERO DE MONTE CARLO

The all-male classical-ballet troupe makes its “Celebrate Brooklyn!” début with a strong program showcasing the company’s mix of loving parody and serious technique. “Go for Barocco” sends up Balanchine, “Paquita” takes on Petipa, and “Swan Lake, Act II” needs no explanation. (Prospect Park Bandshell, Prospect Park W. at 9th St. 718-683-5600. June 27 at 8.)

RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL / STEPHEN PETRONIO COMPANY

The troupe re-stages its opulent, technically dazzling dance of death, “Like Lazarus Did,” at St. Paul’s Chapel, downtown. The excellent Young People’s Chorus of New York City accompanies the performance. (209 Broadway. 212-233-4164. June 29 at 7:30.)

RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL / LUCIANA ACHUGAR

The Uruguayan-born experimentalist presents a roving site-specific work in Lower Manhattan. Her dancers squat, swish their hair, get tangled in their clothes, and seem to experience their bodies in an earthy, grounded way. The ensemble’s crawl through the financial district is apt to attract stares and the odd giggle, and it’s unlikely to be boring. See rivertorivernyc.com for details. (100 Wall St. July 2 at 7. Through July 11.)

OUT OF TOWN

JACOB’S PILLOW

Compagnie Käfig, led by the French choreographer Mourad Merzouki, brings an all-Brazilian, all-male cast of hip-hop dancers back, by popular demand, to the Ted Shawn Theatre. In “Correria,” the men play with slow motion, speed, and prop limbs. In “Agwa,” they navigate amid five hundred plastic cups. To the Doris Duke comes “Leo,” a one-man show by the German company Circle of Eleven in which an acrobat in a boxy room defies gravity with the aid of video. (Becket, Mass. 413-243-0745. June 26-30.)

INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF ARTS AND IDEAS

The dancer and choreographer Shantala Shivalingappa presents an evening devoted to the South Indian classical dance Kuchipudi at this annual festival. Shivalingappa, who grew up in Paris and is the daughter of a Bharata Natyam dancer, has also collaborated with Pina Bausch and Akram Khan. Though her Kuchipudi style is pure, her varied experiences have allowed her to find a style that is all her own: pared down, stylized, and deeply elegant. The evening of dance, “Akasha,” is set to live music played on traditional instruments, and inspired by “the space beyond all space.” (Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, Mainstage Theatre, 177 College St., New Haven, Conn. 203-498-1212. June 26-28.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Classical

CONCERTS IN TOWN

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC

Alan Gilbert continues his quest to make the Philharmonic a fully modern orchestra by closing his season with a project that brings a unique mix of contemporary talents to two classic Stravinsky ballets. He leads the obscure “Fairy’s Kiss” (a rarely performed homage to Tchaikovsky) and the ubiquitous “Petrushka” in stagings that will combine the choreography of Karole Armitage, the direction and design of Doug Fitch and his crew in Giants Are Small (filling the stage with video, live animation, and puppetry), and, as the solo dancer, City Ballet’s Sara Mearns; in an accompanying film, two Met stars, Anthony Roth Costanzo and Eric Owens, bring their considerable dramatic presence to the non-singing roles of Petrushka and the Moor. (Avery Fisher Hall. 212-875-5656. June 27 at 7:30 and June 28-29 at 8.)

TILT BRASS TENTH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

Having spearheaded a new, high-voltage aesthetic in the city’s music scene—chamber brass—the trombonist Chris McIntyre’s ensemble is ready to party. The official tenth-anniversary concert at Roulette (featuring such musicians as the trumpeter Gareth Flowers and the percussionist David Shively) offers a bushel of world-première and U.S.-première works by McIntyre, Anthony Coleman, Lainie Fefferman, Enno Poppe, Mario Diaz de León, and others. (509 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn. roulette.org. June 27 at 8.)

BARGEMUSIC

Tradition reigns at the floating chamber-music series this weekend. On Friday night, the violinist Mark Peskanov (the barge’s director) joins the cellist Evan Drachman and the pianist Doris Stevenson in music by Beethoven, Saint-Saëns (including “The Swan”), and Arensky (the stirring Piano Trio in D Minor); on Saturday night, the cellist Adrian Daurov and the pianist Di Wu traverse sonatas for cello and piano by Beethoven (in A Major, Op. 69) and Rachmaninoff, as well as Schumann’s “Fantasiestücke,” Op. 73; and Sunday afternoon belongs to three exciting young musicians, the clarinettist Alexander Fiterstein, the cellist Nicholas Canellakis, and the pianist Steven Beck, who perform small works by Lutosł awski and Ofer Ben-Amots, as well as the Clarinet Trios of Beethoven and Brahms. (Fulton Ferry Landing, Brooklyn. bargemusic.org. June 28-29 at 8 and June 30 at 2.)

CASSATT STRING QUARTET AND MARI KIMURA

The agendas of the River to River Festival and the New York Electronic Arts Festival will merge for several events this summer, including a concert that features an appearance by the admired all-female string quartet. Kimura, a violinist and composer noted for her original work in string-instrument “subharmonics,” will perform with the group in the world première of “One,” an interactive mini-opera created in collaboration with the Japanese filmmaker Tomoyuki Kato. (Michael Schimmel Center, Pace University, 3 Spruce St. 212-346-1715. June 30 at 7:30.)

JUPITER SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS

The Players, who mix repertory standards with selections from the back corners of the classical library, are joined by the violinist Mikhail Kopelman for their next concert, in which Tchaikovsky’s string sextet, “Souvenir de Florence,” is preceded by three Italian rarities: graceful works by Bottesini, Cimarosa, and Cavallini. (Christ and St. Stephen’s Church, 120 W. 69th St. 212-799-1259. July 1 at 7:30.)

GLASS FARM ENSEMBLE: “DOLCE TORMENTO”

The pianist Yvonne Troxler’s group makes a vital contribution to the New York avant-garde scene while discreetly promoting music by Swiss composers. Works by two of them—Michael Jarrell, known here for his performances by the New York Philharmonic, and Alfred Zimmerlin—bookend a program that also offers works by the noted Paula Matthusen and the international stars Kaija Saariaho (the concert’s title piece, for solo piccolo, performed by Margaret Lancaster) and Frederic Rzewski (“Spots,” for flute, clarinet, percussion, and piano). (Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th St. symphonyspace.org. July 1 at 7:30.)

ARGENTO ENSEMBLE: MUSIC BY GEORG FRIEDRICH HAAS

The distinguished Austrian modernist composer—whose String Quartet No. 3, performed in total darkness, has become a cause célèbre—is joining the faculty of Columbia University. And the Austrian Cultural Forum, in its charmingly formal and friendly way, is putting out the welcome mat, celebrating his arrival with a concert performed by Michel Galante’s superb ensemble. Haas’s “ATTHIS,” featuring the soprano Sharon Harms, is the concert’s high point, programmed alongside pieces by Berg and Webern. (11 E. 52nd St. July 2 at 7:30. To reserve free tickets, visit acfny.org.)

OUT OF TOWN

CARAMOOR

June 27 at 6: As most of the country’s opera fanatics know, Will Crutchfield’s Bel Canto at Caramoor program will tackle Verdi’s two French operas, “Les Vêpres Siciliennes” and “Don Carlos,” at the gracious Westchester festival this summer. As a prelude, Angela Meade, the star of “Siciliennes,” and members of the Caramoor Virtuosi will take part in “The Intimate Verdi,” an evening that includes his “Ave Maria Volgarizzata da Dante” for soprano and strings and the sadly neglected (and utterly lovely) String Quartet in E Minor. | June 28 at 8 and June 30 at 4:30: Caramoor is holding an American Roots festival this week, but traditional chamber music is not being ignored. In the first of two events, the cellist Edward Arron’s Caramoor Virtuosi (which also includes such musicians as the violinists Jennifer and Laura Frautschi and the violist Max Mandel) return to explore some repertory novelties by Cherubini, Enescu (the towering Octet for Strings), and Beethoven (a strings-only arrangement of the “Kreutzer” Sonata) at the intimate Spanish Courtyard; in the second, the Frautschi sisters join their fellow-violinists Tim Fain, Joseph Lin, and Arnaud Sussman (and such pianists as Michael Brown and Jeewon Park) in “The Art of the Duo,” a traversal of five of Beethoven’s Sonatas for Violin and Piano (including the Sonata No. 7 in C Minor and the Sonata No. 9 in A, “Kreutzer,” in its canonical configuration), at the spacious Venetian Theatre. (Katonah, N.Y. 914-232-1252.)

ASTON MAGNA: “MASTERWORKS BY J. S. BACH AND MARIN MARAIS”

This small but distinguished festival has been bringing high-quality, historically informed performances of music from the Renaissance through the Classical era to the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley for forty-one years. The soprano Dominique Labelle is a longtime star of the group; she’ll be out front in works by Marin Marais and in Bach’s cantata “Jauchzet Gott in Allen Landen,” part of a concert by these quintessentially French and German composers that also features Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2; Daniel Stepner conducts. (Olin Hall, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. astonmagna.org. June 28 at 8.)

HUDSON VALLEY CHAMBER MUSIC CIRCLE

This brief, three-concert series, directed by the violinist Jaime Laredo and the cellist Sharon Robinson, forms a bridge to the increasingly active summer concert scene in the Hudson Valley. It wraps up with a program by their Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, performing Beethoven’s Piano Trio in G Major, Op. 1, No. 2, André Previn’s Piano Trio No. 2, and, for a fiery close, Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor (with the violist Stephen Tenenbom). (Olin Hall, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. hvcmc.org. June 29 at 8.)

MUSIC MOUNTAIN

The St. Petersburg String Quartet (joined by the pianist Victoria Schwartzman and the bassist Peter Askim) brings an authentically Russian touch—Shostakovich’s searing Quartet No. 7 in F-Sharp Minor—to a program that is bookended by two cozy Viennese masterpieces, Mozart’s Quartet in D Minor, K. 421, and Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. (Falls Village, Conn. 860-824-7126. June 30 at 3.)

MAVERICK CONCERTS

To those who know it, the Maverick is a treasure: a music chapel in the woods built ninety-seven years ago by a bunch of Woodstock artists, which not only held up but turned out to have warm and enveloping acoustics. Since string quartets sound especially at home there, it’s not surprising that one of the finest around, the commanding Miró Quartet, has been chosen to begin the season. Joined by the pianist Melvin Chen, the group performs Beethoven’s “Serioso” Quartet, Schumann’s Piano Quartet, and—since British music is integral to the festival this year—Elgar’s magisterial Piano Quintet in A Minor, rarely heard this side of the Atlantic. (Woodstock, N.Y. maverickconcerts.org. June 30 at 4.)

TANGLEWOOD

The season at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer outpost begins modestly, with a yearly tradition: the String Quartet Marathon (featuring music by Haydn and Beethoven), offered by the Tanglewood Music Center’s outstanding young fellows. (Lenox, Mass. 888-266-1200. July 1 at 11 A.M. and 2:30 and July 2 at 11 A.M.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Movies

OPENING

A BAND CALLED DEATH

A documentary about the early-seventies punk band Death, directed by Mark Covino and Jeff Howlett. (See Night Life.) Opening June 28. (Cinema Village.)

BYZANTIUM

Neil Jordan directed this thriller, about two vampires (Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton) who take shelter in a seaside hotel. Opening June 28. (In limited release.)

THE HEAT

Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy star in this comedy, as two incompatible law-enforcement officers who must work together to catch a drug kingpin. Directed by Paul Feig. Opening June 28. (In wide release.)

I’M SO EXCITED

Pedro Almodóvar directed this comedy, about airplane passengers who, facing impending catastrophe, seek refuge in sex. Starring Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz. In Spanish. Opening June 28. (In limited release.)

LAURENCE ANYWAYS

A drama, directed by Xavier Dolan, about a man whose long-term relationship with a woman is threatened by his desire to live as a woman. Starring Melvil Poupaud, Suzanne Clément, and Nathalie Baye. In French. Opening June 28. (In limited release.)

MUSEUM HOURS

Jem Cohen directed this drama, about a guard in a Vienna museum who befriends a lonely Canadian woman. In German and English. Opening June 28. (In limited release.)

SING ME THE SONGS THAT SAY I LOVE YOU

A filmed concert in honor of Kate McGarrigle, featuring her children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright. Directed by Lian Lunson. Opening June 26. (Film Forum.)

WHITE HOUSE DOWN

A thriller, directed by Roland Emmerich, about an attempt to rescue the President (Jamie Foxx) after his kidnapping by a terrorist group. Co-starring Channing Tatum and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Opening June 28. (In wide release.)

NOW PLAYING

BEFORE MIDNIGHT

The latest in Richard Linklater’s series of garrulous films about a Franco-American romantic alliance. Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), who first met when they were very young, in “Before Sunrise” (1995), parted, then got back together, in “Before Sunset” (2004), and now have twin daughters and are spending the summer in beautiful Messinia, in southern Greece. The self-consciousness that was both charming and irritating in the earlier films has given way to the toughened egotism that allows people to survive. Delpy has developed a hard set to her mouth and a prickly temper; Hawke speaks in a leathery, deep voice and throws himself into clowning, satire, and sudden rages. After a long walk through ruins, the two settle into a hotel for a night and fall into an extraordinary half-hour quarrel, which, in its bitterness, complication, and psychological revelation, recalls episodes from Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage.” As always, Linklater works in virtuoso long takes that extend duration in a way that’s rarely attempted in Hollywood filmmaking.—David Denby (Reviewed in our issue of 5/27/13.) (In wide release.)

THE BLING RING

The most exquisitely crafted movie ever made about a bunch of nitwits. Drawing on Nancy Jo Sales’s reporting for a 2010 article in Vanity Fair (“The Suspects Wore Louboutins”), the writer and director, Sofia Coppola, moves swiftly and elegantly through the momentous events: In 2008 and 2009, a group of teen-agers from Calabasas, a wealthy city in the San Fernando Valley, broke into the houses of select celebrities—Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, Audrina Patridge, and Orlando Bloom—and made off with three million dollars’ worth of cash, Rolex watches, Birkin bags, Alexander McQueen sunglasses, and the like, and when they were arrested they became minor celebrities themselves. Coppola has pulled together the trends of the past fifteen years—reality TV, TMZ, the Internet, social media—and has dramatized how, working together, they might produce an appalling new kind of teen-ager. Emma Watson plays Nicki, the most confident of the teens, who has no self; she’s all arch, bullying presentation. With Israel Broussard and Katie Chang.—D.D. (6/10 & 17/13) (In wide release.)

DRUNKEN MASTER 2

Jackie Chan puts the slap back into slapstick as a Cantonese martial-arts legend who helps stop the British from grabbing up Chinese treasures after the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1912. While building up furious momentum, Chan and his co-director, Lau Kar-leung, have fun with everything from mah-jongg, herbal medicine, and the hero’s harried family life to the conventions of martial-arts movies. Chan turns drunken boxing—an alcohol-fuelled, seemingly free-form type of fighting, as circular as it is angular—into an elating display of physical comedy. Every bit of him is limber, including his funny bone. In Cantonese.—Michael Sragow (Film Society of Lincoln Center; June 27.)

FAST & FURIOUS 6

The franchise that began with “The Fast and the Furious” has now been hurtling along for twelve years. Much has changed in that time, not least the momentous decision to drop definite articles from the title. The latest chapter, directed by Justin Lin, finds Toretto (Vin Diesel), O’Conner (Paul Walker), and the rest of the gang, all of whom have retired from active duty to lead lives of sumptuous ease, being summoned back by law enforcers (Dwayne Johnson and Gina Carano) and put to work. The backchat between the drivers feels slow, grinding, and cumbersome, the better to show off their quicksilver talents at the wheel. Just as the plot threatens to run out of gas, Lin rescues the film with a spate of vastly ridiculous and therefore enjoyable set-pieces, most of which involve means of conveyance designed to make the cars look puny. The cast has a multiracial verve that would shame more sombre productions: Sung Kang, Michelle Rodriguez, Gal Gadot, Tyrese Gibson, and Chris (Ludacris) Bridges, plus a scowling Welshman, Luke Evans, in the role of the villain.—Anthony Lane (6/3/13) (In wide release.)

FRANCES HA

With its homages to modern French classics, music cues from Truffaut films, and a veritable Paris holiday in the middle, Noah Baumbach’s new film—which he co-wrote with its star, Greta Gerwig—links the already classic themes and moods of New York independent filmmaking to those of the New Wave and its successors. Gerwig’s Frances—an eternal fledgling dancer at twenty-seven, with dwindling status, shrinking income, an evaporating love life, and a fraying best-friendship with Sophie (Mickey Sumner), her soon-to-be ex-roommate—is, in effect, being flayed alive in the big city and somehow manages to smile through it all. Reduced to living as a perma-guest, her artistic dreams thwarted, her loving family far off (in Sacramento) and unable to help, Frances, with a rictus affixed to her agonies, nonetheless has the one thing that her trials and tribulations can’t take away: her idiosyncrasy. With her exquisitely touching spontaneity and the spin of verbal and gestural invention with which she inflects the slightest interaction—and despite her embarrassingly impulsive self-revelations and equally awkward deceptions—Frances is an artist whose medium is life itself, and Baumbach, his camera open with calm adoration, channels her waves of wonder and possibility. Co-starring Adam Driver and Michael Zegen.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)

GOOD MORNING

The opening shots of this 1959 comic drama—with their electrical towers dominating and despoiling a modest hillside suburb, passers-by peeking through gaps between tightly packed little houses, and schoolboys in uniform pretending to be flatulent robots—seem straight out of Jacques Tati but actually belong to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, whose sense of generational conflict in a society at risk from within is here at its sharpest and most anarchic. The story is centered on two television-mad young boys, the domineering Minoru and his antic little brother, Isamu, who sneak out to watch sumo-wrestling broadcasts at a friend’s house and protest, with a vow of silence, their father’s refusal to buy a TV set. The bland title refers to the surface sociability of adults’ small talk that the boys find repellent; Ozu uses their silence as a shattering reproach to a society that runs on the insincerity of convention—and their blunt aggression as a reproach to sincerity. The malice of gossip, the grinding struggle of salarymen, and the yearning for love are all softened by material conveniences even as their production—as seen in a nightmare jangle of overhead wires and smoke-spewing factories—embodies a country finally at peace but devoid of calm. In Japanese.—R.B. (Film Forum; June 27.)

MAN OF STEEL

When Superman was first reborn in the movies, back in 1978, Mario Puzo, Robert Benton, and David Newman worked on the screenplay, and Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder played Superman and Lois Lane. All these people knew they were working on pop, and the material was edged with irony—as Superman and Lois flirted, the movie was even sexy. Thirty-five years of superhero franchises followed, saving the studios financially (while wrecking the aesthetics of big movies), and the tone of the new Superman movie is now portentous and solemn. The movie is an origins myth, which turns into another war-of-the-worlds battle between Earth and the dying Krypton, with Superman on our side). Once again, Manhattan gets levelled (don’t worry: Brooklyn is spared). The movie consists of endless declamation, endless violence. With the muscular Henry Cavill, baring his chest, as Superman; Amy Adams, as Lois Lane; and Michael Shannon, as General Zod, the military chief of Krypton. Written by David S. Goyer. Directed, with a heavy hand, by Zack Snyder.—D.D. (In wide release.)

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

A new adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy, and a far cry from the hearty roistering of Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version. This time, the director is Joss Whedon, who filmed the play in his own home, in Santa Monica; one speech is delivered in a child’s bedroom, beside a doll’s house and a couple of Barbies. Most of the men, including Don Pedro (Reed Diamond), Claudio (Fran Kranz), Benedick (Alexis Denisof), and the evil Don John (Sean Maher), are hunks, of one grade or another, dressed in decent suits, and the sense that they are merely toying with the rules of love, by way of a guys’ game, is unmistakable; hence the lurch in tone, to a frowning solemnity, when the purity of Hero (Jillian Morgese), Claudio’s beloved, comes into question—often a problem, in a modern setting. Yet the movie swings along, with a grace denied to some of Whedon’s grander projects, like “The Avengers,” and the honors are shared between Amy Acker, whose Beatrice seems as self-inquiring as she is sharp at others’ expense; Nathan Fillion, who, as Dogberry, makes even the malapropisms amusing (no easy feat); and Jay Hunter, the director of photography, whose feathery black-and-white images turn the whole thing into a midsummer day’s dream.—A.L. (6/24/13) (In limited release.)

NOW YOU SEE ME

Complicated nonsense about four professional magicians caught up in an elaborate revenge plot. Again and again, one character tells another that he’s a step behind what’s going on, and it’s as if the movie were saying to the audience: “You think you get it, but you don’t. By the time you catch up, the story will be doing something else.” But the director, Louis Leterrier, and the writers, Edward Ricourt, Ed Solomon, and Boaz Yakin, hardly seem to realize that viewers’ delight in cleverness and shape-shifting invention has measurable limits. Someone must have told Leterrier in his youth that everything in a film should move, because he shoots even the simplest expository scenes with multiple cameras swirling around the actors. With Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, and Dave Franco (who looks like Tom Cruise’s kid brother but is actually James Franco’s), as the four con artists; Mark Ruffalo, as a relentless officer of the law; and Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, who punch the clock in meaningless roles.—D.D. (6/10 & 17/13) (In wide release.)

PICKPOCKET

The nimble crime of the title, perfected by a fiercely philosophical outlaw (Martin LaSalle), is itself a work of art, and Robert Bresson, in his 1959 film, reveals it, in all of its varieties, as a furtive street ballet. The story begins with money changing hands, and throughout the film, Bresson burns into memory the clink of coins and the crumple of bills—which comes off as the damning sound of evil made matter. The film is modelled on “Crime and Punishment”: the criminal, Michel, jousts verbally (borrowing phrases from the novel) with a cagey police inspector to assert his own superiority to the law, and crosses paths with a drunkard’s toiling, spiritual daughter, Jeanne (Marika Green). Bresson, filming nonactors in austerely precise images, also evokes Dostoyevskian emotional extremes: torment and exaltation, nihilistic fury and religious passion. But the movie is above all a love story, about the miracle of redemptive love and its price in humility and unconditional surrender. In French.—R.B. (MOMA; June 26-28.)

THE RIVER’S EDGE

This luridly colorful modern-day quasi-Western, from 1957, starts as a melodramatic precursor to “Green Acres.” Meg Cameron (Debra Paget), a brassy and stylish city woman, is miserable on the small Southwestern desert ranch where she lives in isolation with her gruff but worshipful straight-arrow husband, Ben (Anthony Quinn), and prepares to leave him. But the story veers into roiling survivalist film-noir territory when a pink convertible bearing her former lover and partner in crime, the slick grifter Nardo Denning (Ray Milland), rolls up. Meg, out of jail on probation after Nardo set her up, can’t get him out of her system; Nardo, with an aluminum briefcase full of ill-gotten cash, wants to escape with her across the border to Mexico and needs an experienced local hand—Ben, whom he holds at gunpoint—to get them there. The director, Allan Dwan, fills the sunbaked landscape with an acrid haze of bilious moods and a suffocating tangle of mixed emotions, which he conjures by means of astonishingly sharp, stark images of stifled frenzy. One sequence in particular, of a border-patrol inspection gone bad, is an anthology piece of efficient, expressive action filmmaking; in a few slashing brushstrokes, Dwan captures the ecstatic horror of life on the edge.—R.B. (MOMA; June 28-29.)

SHORT TERM 12

The second feature by Destin Daniel Cretton, set in and around an intake facility for evaluating troubled teens, looks closely at its fascinating characters to get at the notion of character itself. The story is centered on Grace (Brie Larson) and Mason (John Gallagher, Jr.), two of the young adults who are the day-to-day, hands-on guardians. Their ill-defined jobs entail everything from physical restraint and police-like snooping to quasi-therapeutic interventions—and even seriocomic pursuits, through city streets, of youths who slip past the gate. The teens in their care fit a familar, tightly defined array of ethnicities and personalities, but Cretton—who worked in such a facility—narrowly skirts the risk of stereotyping through the force of imagination. His dialogue is wondrously energized, suggesting impulses and experiences that range far beyond the confines of the plot’s problems, and Grace and Mason—a droll and sensible couple whose relationship is tested by their work—remain passionately loose-ended and casual, embodying the rare ideal of peaceful people you’d follow into battle. Subtly inverting the story’s point of view, Cretton sees his protagonists through the eyes of the teens and gets to the ineffable core of trust.—R.B. (BAM; June 28.)

THIS IS MARTIN BONNER

This poised, involuted micro-drama concerns the daily struggle of a lonely sixtyish divorcé (Paul Eenhoorn), an Australian immigrant, to find his footing in Reno, Nevada. His job, as a counsellor to prisoners awaiting release, brings him into connection with Travis Holloway (Richmond Arquette), who is freed after serving a twelve-year sentence and is in need of friendship as well as guidance. The writer and director, Chad Hartigan, transforms the potentially maudlin premise into a poised and luminous reach for grace. As the spare, sharp dialogue and tensely searching performances elicit lives filled with pain and loss, Hartigan’s images (realized by the cinematographer, Sean McElwee) capture a serene spiritual bounty that shines through the daily grit and grind. Despite the small scale of the action—Travis’s effort to reconnect with his daughter (Sam Buchanan), Martin’s poignant attempt at speed-dating encounter—the movie plays for high stakes. Roiling beneath the surface of the action is the question of what makes life worth living; the story pivots on a crisis of faith, and Hartigan audaciously offers practical advice for facing the unbearable—and to present, as in a full-circle pan shot of Travis in his first dawn of freedom, vision itself as the garden of earthly delight.—R.B. (In limited release.)

THIS IS THE END

A noisy shindig, hosted by Seth Rogen. He and Evan Goldberg wrote and directed it, and Rogen is in evidence from the start, welcoming his friend Jay Baruchel to Los Angeles. Both of them, like the majority of people in the movie, play themselves; we are meant to feel a pinch of awe and gratitude at being allowed into the orbit of real stars, and that bonding feeling is only heightened by the awareness that, for our comic benefit, they are forever cutting each down to size. Does that make the actors—Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, James Franco, Michael Cera, Emma Watson, and others—good sports, or careful guardians of their own image? Either way, the film is more guileful than it looks, even though the narrative is nuts: a celebrity-crammed party at Franco’s place that suddenly turns into the apocalypse, as Hollywood, not a moment too soon, is consumed by the fires of Hell. Throughout the movie, all mouths are foul, all bellies are yellow, all drugs are on the table, and all the guys want candy—an accurate assessment of contemporary manhood, you might say, although the casual misogyny that bedecks it feels a whole lot less amusing. As for the weird eschatology that Rogen and Goldberg appeal to in the later stages, rife with rapture and damnation, don’t even ask where that came from. Just enjoy the ride.—A.L. (6/24/13) (In wide release.)

20 FEET FROM STARDOM

Some iconic background singers step into the spotlight in this loving tribute from director Morgan Neville. The classic call-and-response foundation set for some of rock’s most memorable songs—including Merry Clayton’s hair-raising vocals on “Gimme Shelter” and Lisa Fischer’s stellar work with the divas Chaka Khan and Tina Turner—is put in the spotlight, and interviews with such superstars as Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen offer ample insight into what their vocal presence provides. The documentary also concentrates on the personal implications of their professional and artistic choices and explores the exploitation that they endured. This spirited, thoughtful look at unheralded but ubiquitous artists gives supreme credit where credit is due. With the powerhouse vocalists Gloria Jones, Lynn Mabry, and the incomparable Darlene Love.—Bruce Diones (In limited release.)

ALSO PLAYING

THE ATTACK: In limited release. BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO: In limited release. MONSTERS UNIVERSITY: In wide release.

REVIVALS, CLASSICS, ETC.

Titles with a dagger are reviewed above.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

32 Second Ave., at 2nd St. (212-505-5181)—Special screenings. June 26-27 at 7:15 and 9: “Kuichisan” (2011, Maiko Endo). | In revival. June 30 at 3:45: Films by Joseph Cornell, Program 1, including “Centuries of June” (1955). | June 30 at 6: Films by Joseph Cornell, Program 2, including “Children” (ca. 1957).

BAM CINÉMATEK

30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100)—“BAMcinemaFest 2013.” June 26 at 7: “C.O.G.” (2013, Kyle Patrick Alvarez). | June 27 at 8:30: “Drinking Buddies” (2013, Joe Swanberg). | June 27 at 9:30: Short documentaries, including “Skinningrove” (2012, Michael Almereyda). | June 28 at 8:30: “Short Term 12” (+). | June 28 at 9:30: “Newlyweeds” (2013, Shaka King). | “The Hitchcock 9.” All films are silent. June 29 at 3: “The Ring” (1927). | June 29 at 7:30: “Blackmail” (1929). | June 30 at 3: “The Manxman” (1929). | June 30 at 7:30: “The Lodger” (1926). | July 1 at 7: “Downhill” (1927). | July 2 at 7: “The Farmer’s Wife” (1928). | July 2 at 9:15: “Easy Virtue” (1927).

FILM FORUM

W. Houston St. west of Sixth Ave. (212-727-8110)—The films of Yasujiro Ozu. June 26 at 1, 3:10, and 8:10: “An Autumn Afternoon” (1962). | June 26 at 6:25: “That Night’s Wife” (1930). | June 27 at 1, 4:30, and 8: “A Hen in the Wind” (1948). | June 27 at 2:40, 6:10, and 9:40: “Good Morning” (+). | In revival. June 28-30 and July 2-4 at 2, 4:30, 7, and 9:30 and July 1 at 2, 4:30, and 9:30: “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968, Roman Polanski). | July 1 at 7: “Camille” (1936, George Cukor).

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER

Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610)—The films of Jackie Chan. June 26 at 4:30: “Little Big Soldier” (2010; in Mandarin). | June 27 at 2: “Drunken Master 2” (+). | June 27 at 4:15: “Police Story” (1985; in Cantonese). | New York Asian Film Festival 2013. June 28 at 4: “The Lady Avenger” (1985, Yang Chia-Yun; in Mandarin). | June 29 at 1: “The Legend Is Born: Ip Man” (2010, Herman Yau; in Cantonese). | June 30 at 3:45: “Arahan” (2004, Ryoo Seung-wan; in Korean).

FRENCH INSTITUTE ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE

55 E. 59th St. (212-355-6160)—“Highlights of the Cannes Film Festival.” July 2 at 12:30, 4, and 7:30: “Histoire(s) du Cinéma” (1988, Jean-Luc Godard).

IFC CENTER

323 Sixth Ave., at W. 3rd St. (212-924-7771)—In revival. June 27 at 7:30: “L’Age d’Or” (1930, Luis Buñuel), followed by a discussion with Crispin Hellion Glover. | June 28-30 at 11 A.M.: “History of the World: Part I” (1981, Mel Brooks).

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Roy and Niuta Titus Theatres, 11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9480)—“An Auteurist History of Film.” June 26-28 at 1:30: “Pickpocket” (+) and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1962, Robert Enrico). | The films of Deborah Stratman. June 26 and June 29 at 4: “Kings of the Sky” (2004). | June 28 at 4: “Energy Country” (2003) and “O’er the Land” (2009). | June 29 at 1:30: “Shrimp Chicken Fish” (2010) and “The BLVD” (1999). | The films of Allan Dwan. June 26 at 4:30 and June 27 at 8: “Suez” (1938). | June 28 at 4:30 and June 29 at 2: “Driftwood” (1947). | June 28 at 8 and June 29 at 5: “The River’s Edge” (+). | June 29 at 8 and June 30 at 2:30: “The Restless Breed” (1957). | July 1 at 8: “Escape to Burma” (1955). | July 2 at 4: “Sweethearts on Parade” (1953).

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077)—“See It Big!” June 28 at 7: “The Tree of Life” (2011, Terrence Malick). | June 29 at 6:30: “Lost Highway” (1997, David Lynch). | June 30 at 1: “Mulholland Drive” (2001, Lynch).

92Y TRIBECA

200 Hudson St., at Canal St. (212-601-1000)—In revival. July 1 at 10:30: “Network” (1976, Sidney Lumet).

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Readings and Talks

“WORD FOR WORD”

Ellin Stein discusses her new book, “That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick: The National Lampoon and the Comedy Insurgents Who Captured the Mainstream,” with Sean Kelly and Chris Cerf, former editors at the magazine. (Bryant Park, Sixth Ave. at 42nd St. 212-768-4242. June 26 at 12:30.)

NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Larry Kramer, a co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, talks about his 1985 play, “The Normal Heart,” with Tony Kushner, in an evening presented in conjunction with the Society’s exhibition “AIDS in New York: The First Five Years.” (170 Central Park W., at 77th St. 212-873-3400. June 26 at 6:30.)

STRAND BOOK STORE

Nicole Audrey Spector, a contributor to this magazine and the author of the new parody “Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray,” discusses writing about historic literary characters, with the brothers Jonathan and Tad Richards, whose 2012 novel, “Nick & Jake,” features Nick Carraway, from “The Great Gatsby,” and Jake Barnes, from “The Sun Also Rises.” (Broadway at 12th St. 212-473-1452. June 26 at 7.)

“YET DO I MARVEL: A TRIBUTE TO COUNTEE CULLEN”

To mark the publication of the Library of America’s “Countee Cullen: Collected Poems,” the Poetry Society of America and the Woodlawn Conservancy present the poets Major Jackson (who edited the collection), Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Robin Coste Lewis, who will read poems in tribute to Cullen, accompanied by the mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran, in a celebration that will take place steps from Cullen’s grave. (Woolworth Chapel, the Woodlawn Cemetery, Jerome and Bainbridge Aves., the Bronx. 718-920-1469. June 29 at 3.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Above and Beyond

U.S. AIR GUITAR NORTHEAST SEMIFINALS

This competition is no joke. The hosting organization identifies itself as a “Church/Religious Organization” on its Facebook page, and its motto is “It’s real. And it’s spectacular.” Björn Türoque, star of the 2006 documentary “Air Guitar Nation,” hosts the event, and the air-guitar champ Hot Lixx Hulahan will judge and perform with the current World Air Guitar title holder, Nordic Thunder. Three lucky winners will go on to compete against other vicarious shredders in the U.S. finals in Los Angeles next month. (Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. 212-533-2111. July 2.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
On the Horizon

MOVIES

WILD MAN BLUES

July 6-31

John Cassavetes may be the most influential American director of the last half century. BAM’s retrospective of his work includes all of his features (in 35-mm. prints) and some movies in which he acted, including Elaine May’s “Mikey and Nicky.” (718-636-4100.)

THE THEATRE

THE DATING GAME

July 9

One of the few Broadway shows opening this summer is “First Date,” a new musical about a couple on an awkward, epic blind date. The music and lyrics are by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner and the book is by Austin Winsberg (“Gossip Girl”); Bill Berry directs Krysta Rodriguez (“Smash”) and Zachary Levi (“Chuck”), at the Longacre. (212-239-6200.)

READINGS AND TALKS

NO QUESTION

July 10

Meena Alexander, Marcella Durand, Wayne Koestenbaum, and others celebrate the publication of “The Collected Poems of Marcel Proust” by joining the book’s editor, Harold Augenbraum (founder of the Proust Society of America), for a reading at Poets House on Proust’s birthday. (poetshouse.org.)

ART

LET US NOW PRAISE

July 19-Jan. 26

In “Walker Evans American Photographs,” the Museum of Modern Art celebrates the seventy-fifth anniversary of its first solo show by a photographer, with an exhibition of some sixty works. (212-708-9400.)

CLASSICAL MUSIC

BEFORE WOODSTOCK

July 27

Thirty years before Jimi Hendrix rocked the Woodstock festival, Benjamin Britten spent a summer in the town, composing his song cycle “Les Illuminations.” Maverick Concerts marks the composer’s centenary with a performance of the work featuring the young Met tenor Paul Appleby. (maverickconcerts.org.)

CONTRIBUTORS
Contributors

Steve Coll (Comment) is the new dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia, and a staff writer.

Alec Wilkinson (The Talk of the Town), a longtime contributor, is the author of ten books, including “The Ice Balloon,” which is out in paperback.

Michael Specter (“The Lyme Wars”), a staff writer since 1998, concentrates on science, medicine, and global public health. His latest book is “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives.”

Maxine Kumin (Poem) is a former U.S. Poet Laureate who has published seventeen books of poetry. A forthcoming collection, “And Short the Season,” is due out next year.

John McPhee (“The Orange Trapper”) has written twenty-eight books, including “Silk Parachute.”

Jesse Eisenberg (Shouts & Murmurs), an actor and a playwright, is the author of “The Revisionist,” which débuted Off Broadway earlier this year.

Ivan Brunetti (Cover) is an illustrator and a cartoonist. His book “Aesthetics: A Memoir” was published in May.

Jon Lee Anderson (“State of Terror”) has published several books, including “The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan” and “Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World.”

Jehad Nga (Photographs) is an award-winning photographer. An exhibition of his photographs at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery, in New York, through July 13th, includes works from Mali and from his most recent project, “The Green Book Study.”

Charles Simic (Poem), the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist, and translator, recently published “New and Selected Poems 1962-2012.”

Calvin Tomkins (“Ed Ruscha’s L.A.”) is the author of several books, including, most recently, “Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews,” which came out in February.

Joyce Carol Oates (Fiction) has written many works of fiction, including “Daddy Love” and “The Accursed,” which were published earlier this year.

Ian Buruma (Books) teaches at Bard College. His new book, “Year Zero: A History of 1945,” comes out in September.

THE MAIL
Entering the Quagmire

A letter in response to Dexter Filkins’s article (May 13, 2013)

Dexter Filkins reports that President Obama, in his deliberations on whether to intervene in the Syrian conflict, chose to adopt a policy of restraint (“The Thin Red Line,” May 13th). For this, his detractors accused him of being an isolationist. Instead, by limiting foreign military intervention to those scenarios where the national interest is at issue, he was acting as a disciple of realpolitik, and as a classic foreign-policy conservative in the mold of the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and Germany’s Bismarck. Unfortunately, Obama has now decided to send small arms to Syrian rebels, and it appears that he has second-guessed himself. But while Filkins focusses on Syria, the President has avoided unnecessary military conflict elsewhere. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison would have been proud of his courage in standing up to his more hawkish contemporaries.

David Frazier

Pascagoula, Miss.

THE MAIL
Entering the Quagmire

A letter in response to Dexter Filkins’s article (May 13, 2013)

Filkins reports that Senator John McCain has pushed for military intervention in Syria. But I doubt that, in 2013, Republicans will tolerate “emergency authorizations,” even if they raised no objections to these off-budget costs a decade ago. Indeed, overruling a national-security team might show more wisdom than McCain might think. President Obama overruled his Secretary of Defense in 2011, when he authorized the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Obama is weighing the morality, costs, and unintended consequences of another conflict after learning the hard lessons of exiting Iraq and now Afghanistan. Perhaps he is heeding the proverb “The more we sweat in peace, the less we bleed in war.”

Michael S. Smith

Tucson, Ariz.

THE MAIL
Entering the Quagmire

A response to Dexter Filkins’s “Obama Acts on Syria—Is It Too Late?” (June 14, 2013)

Filkins updated his reporting with a blog post on June 14th, “Obama Acts on Syria—Is It Too Late?” The post attracted Web comments, presented here, edited for length and clarity.

Filkins writes that as “the Assad regime stepped up its murderous assaults, the President’s caution came to look more like moral indifference.” Has he missed the atrocities committed by the rebels? The fact that we may be indirectly arming terrorists? Filkins argues that Obama has a range of options, but let’s not forget Nicaragua v. United States, in which the International Court of Justice ruled against the U.S. for supporting the Contras in their rebellion against the Nicaraguan government.

Alan Sears

Austin, Texas

THE MAIL
Entering the Quagmire

A response to Dexter Filkins’s “Obama Acts on Syria—Is It Too Late?” (June 14, 2013)

Filkins updated his reporting with a blog post on June 14th, “Obama Acts on Syria—Is It Too Late?” The post attracted Web comments, presented here, edited for length and clarity.

The chance for any sane intervention in Syria was killed by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorized a no-fly zone and “all necessary measures” to protect civilians in Libya, and which passed with abstentions from Russia and China. That seems to have ended any chance of Russian and Chinese participation in any credible U.N. involvement on Syria, thus precluding a Security Council Resolution.

Neil Kitson

Vancouver, B.C.

THE MAIL
Entering the Quagmire

A response to Dexter Filkins’s “Obama Acts on Syria—Is It Too Late?” (June 14, 2013)

Filkins updated his reporting with a blog post on June 14th, “Obama Acts on Syria—Is It Too Late?” The post attracted Web comments, presented here, edited for length and clarity.

I’m having difficulty understanding why we have some line in the sand drawn around the notion of chemical weapons. Is it less barbaric to be attacked with napalm, or to be blown to bits with a rocket or a mine?

Richard Schmidt

Concord, N.C.

THE MAIL
Entering the Quagmire

A response to Dexter Filkins’s “Obama Acts on Syria—Is It Too Late?” (June 14, 2013)

Filkins updated his reporting with a blog post on June 14th, “Obama Acts on Syria—Is It Too Late?” The post attracted Web comments, presented here, edited for length and clarity.

Is it too late to intervene? Yes, it is. Once you’re in, you are in. Humanitarian aid is one thing, arms support is another. Suppose the “rebels” still are not doing well after our arms shipments; then what? More arms, advisers, air strikes, and on and on.

Alan J. Lipowitz

Peterson, Minn.