Kindle Edition, 2013 © The New Yorker

COMMENT
Perceived Threats

by Jelani Cobb

For some years, the N.R.A.’s approach to gun-rights advocacy has amounted to a variant of the old Maoist dictum, to the effect that democracy flows from the barrel of a gun. In March, the group provided a novel twist on the theme of sidearm liberty when it débuted an ad featuring Colion Noir, a young African-American in a low-slung baseball cap, who offered a series of one-liners to explain why he supports gun rights. First among his arguments is the idea that it is absurd for African-Americans to oppose gun access, given the history of racial violence that characterized segregation. Around the time the ad was released, the N.R.A.’s president, David Keene, told an interviewer that African-Americans should recognize that gun-control policy dates back to the attempts to disarm blacks after the Civil War. There’s a neat logic to the N.R.A.’s marketing push: the gun is an essential implement of democracy, so gun rights should appeal to people whose history has been defined by the struggle to achieve civil rights.

Four months after the ad appeared, a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty in the shooting death, last year, of Trayvon Martin. That death was the by-product of a toxic environment of racial profiling, liberal gun access, and self-defense laws—in particular, the controversial Stand Your Ground laws, which originated in Florida, in 2005, and are now on the books in more than twenty states. Speaking at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Orlando three days after the verdict, Attorney General Eric Holder told of his own experience with racial profiling, and his worries for his fifteen-year-old son. The line that generated the biggest response, however, was his statement that “we must stand our ground to insure that our laws reduce violence, and take a hard look at laws that contribute to more violence than they prevent.” Though Holder didn’t mention the N.R.A., his remarks were an implicit rebuttal to the organization—which has been deeply supportive of Stand Your Ground laws—and to its flawed reading of the past. Holder was addressing a group that is intimately familiar with the type of violence that Colion Noir refers to; some who were present are survivors of it. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, but it has also been fifty years since the N.A.A.C.P. field secretary Medgar Evers was gunned down outside his home, in Jackson, Mississippi. Thus a civil-rights organization whose history is marked with violent assaults on its membership cheered the suggestion that self-defense laws could be part of the problem.

The response to Holder’s comments highlights both what has changed in the past half century and what has not. There is a long history of African-American support for gun rights and the principle of armed self-defense. In 1957, after receiving threats of violence, Robert F. Williams armed the N.A.A.C.P. chapter that he led in Monroe, North Carolina. (When the leadership suspended him, he continued his work under the banner of an all-black N.R.A. chapter.) The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist Fannie Lou Hamer spoke publicly of the loaded guns that she kept under her bed, and members of organizations like the Deacons for Defense and Justice carried weapons with the goal of protecting civil-rights workers in the South. Even Walter White, who served as the executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. for twenty-six years, often told of sitting with his father, both of them holding rifles, to protect the family home during the 1906 Atlanta race riots. Yet Keene’s argument about African-Americans and gun rights is utterly cynical—a type of historical malpractice. As with the recent anti-abortion billboards that targeted African-Americans by alluding to racist roots in the birth-control movement, the error lies in importing the past wholesale into the present. The point of history is to learn from it, not to proceed as if we were still living in it.

In 2010, African-Americans constituted thirteen per cent of the nation’s population and fifty-five per cent of its homicide victims. During the Zimmerman trial, the defendant’s supporters repeatedly emphasized that the vast majority of black murder victims die at the hands of other African-Americans. This was meant to imply that the focus on the Martin case was at least mildly hypocritical, but it actually explained why campaigns like the N.R.A.’s Colion Noir ad are not effective among African-Americans—why, instead, they are driving a racial gap in gun policy. Today, whites support gun rights over gun control by a margin of nine points. By contrast, African-Americans support gun control over gun rights by a forty-four-point margin. Keene cites the traumatic memories of Jim Crow violence as reason to support gun rights; African-Americans cite the ongoing bloodletting in American cities as reason not to. The section of the population that is most likely to experience gun violence is also most likely to believe that guns are too easily accessible.

Concern that the Zimmerman verdict might encourage vigilantism reminiscent of the ugly past is only part of the reason for the opposition to Stand Your Ground laws. They can also facilitate gang violence: a gang member, by definition, has reason to fear grievous bodily harm. Then there’s the thorny reality that not all self-defense is created equal. A study by the Urban Institute shows that just one per cent of cases in which a black person shoots a white person is ruled justifiable. When the races are reversed, in states without Stand Your Ground laws, that number climbs to 9.5 per cent; in states with such laws, it reaches almost seventeen per cent.

The N.R.A. has done little to ease the disparity. In May, 2012, Marissa Alexander, an African-American from Jacksonville, Florida, attempted to employ a Stand Your Ground defense after firing a “warning shot” during a dispute with her estranged husband, who had a history of domestic violence. (He was not harmed.) The claim was rejected and she was sentenced to twenty years in prison. The Alexander case appears to be precisely the kind of defense that the N.R.A. would support, especially as it strongly advocates guns as a form of self-protection for women, but the group has remained uninvolved.

At the end of last week, President Obama reëntered the discussion, asking, if Trayvon Martin had been of age and armed, “Do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman . . . because he felt threatened?” He added that, if the answer is “at least ambiguous,” then “we might want to examine those kinds of laws.” The conflict over Stand Your Ground isn’t simply a matter of race; it’s a matter of differing trajectories in history and their implications in the present. Martin’s parents have established the Trayvon Martin Foundation, with the goals of advocating for the families of crime victims, opposing racial profiling, and promoting nonviolent methods of conflict resolution. The rationale of the N.R.A. is to never bring a knife to a gunfight. The preëminent concern of those most affected by violence is to insure that there is no gunfight in the first place. ♦

BABEL DEPT.
Eurenglish 101

by Lauren Collins

The European Union has twenty-four official languages, but, according to Jeremy Gardner, a senior translator at the European Court of Auditors, the real number is closer to twenty-three and a half. Gardner has compiled an anthology of offenses committed in what has come to be known as Eurenglish—an interoffice dialect that, as he writes in “A Brief List of Misused English Terms in E.U. Publications,” relies upon “words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the E.U. institutions.” Last year, when Gardner published his report, it did not garner a tremendous amount of attention. But the document resurfaced this spring, provoking almost as much amusement across Europe as did the E.U.’s attempt to prohibit restaurants from serving olive oil in unmarked cruets. (“Je ne vinaigrette rien,” someone wrote on Twitter.) On the Web site of the London Review of Books, Glen Newey wrote, of Gardner’s project, “Turning Eurenglish back into sense feels a bit like the Laputan project of reducing human excrement to its original food.” A headline in Le Monde asked, “Parlez-vous la novlangue bruxelloise?” The conditionalities seemed adequate to incite planification for a conference in the frame of which Gardner could precise himself.

“Do you have a Prosecco?” Gardner asked the waiter. He had stopped for lunch at the Belgian Arms, a wisteria-covered pub outside London overlooking a small pond. Gardner, whose wife is Italian, has lived abroad since 1979. He was in town to visit his mother. He speaks English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Greek, and some Spanish. (“Just add Portuguese to Italian and divide by two,” he said, of the latter.) At the Court of Auditors—“itself a bad translation”—his job is to translate documents on subjects ranging from school milk to nuclear decommissioning. As a vigilante grammarian, he is a blend of Lynne Truss and Lord Mountbatten. His entry for “fiche” reads, “Fiche is a useful word, but it is French.”

Over rabbit pâté, Gardner explained that he had been motivated by the declining quality of E.U. documents, which, he said, are increasingly written by people for whom English is a second (or third or fourth) language. Many of the mistakes he identifies are false friends (“actual” for “current,” “assist at” for “attend”) or reverse-engineered oddities (“transpose” has somehow come to mean “implement”). If Gardner has his way, cows, sheep, goats, and pigs will cease to be “bovine, ovine, caprine, and porcine animals.” We will no longer see such sentences as ‘When the interoperability constituent is integrated into a Control-Command and Signalling On-board or Track-side Subsystem, if the missing functions, interfaces, or performances do not allow to assess whether the subsystem fully complies with the requirements of this TSI, only an Intermediate Statement of Verification may be issued.”

“This is a real hobbyhorse of mine,” Gardner said. “Do you know how we write numbers in the European Union?”

He scribbled a figure: 5,733.997.

Then he wrote down its E.U. equivalent: 5 733, 997.

“This doesn’t look like a number at all in English,” he said. “It looks like one of those games where you have to guess the sequence!”

Gardner is a protectionist in a world of linguistic free trade. Still, he acknowledged the temptation of what might be called the Gyro Effect: it is sometimes less onerous to use an incorrect form when that form is more widely comprehended. “You notice that everyone makes the same mistakes,” he said. “Very often, you go native.”

Gardner conceded that the occasional screwup is inevitable. “When I ask my daughter how she is, and she says, ‘I’m good,’ it grates, but I don’t really mind,” he said. “But what do we do for a living? We write reports. You should be able to read them.” As for his own gaffes, he said, “My most embarrassing mistake is in Italian, and it has something to do with a cigarette holder.” He would not elaborate. “Go out and Google it,” he said.

The waiter, who happened to be French, returned to the table and asked Gardner if he would like some more wine.

“Une petite verre,” he replied.

The waiter walked away, and Gardner groaned.

“For some reason, I can never remember the gender of ‘glass.’ ” ♦

ON THE WATERFRONT
Kayaktivist

by Nick Paumgarten

Nancy Brous, a costume designer who lives in the West Village, was riding her bicycle on the bike path of the Williamsburg Bridge one night in May when a motor scooter, speeding in the other direction, smashed into her. She went down, and the scooter kept going. It took an hour and a half for an ambulance to figure out how to reach her on the bike path. She had broken several bones in her face.

The injuries prevented her from doing what she loves most—paddling a kayak on the Hudson River. Last year, in her capacity as a co-chair of the New York City Water Trail Association, Brous began collating the complaints of other paddlers that the myriad ferryboats using the river routinely failed to toot their horns before pulling away from the dock, in defiance of maritime law, specifically Inland Navigation Rule 34. The kayakers feared that a ferry might run one of them down. Brous wrote to various entities with some waterfront sway and eventually found herself sending periodic e-mails to the Coast Guard, detailing instances of law-flouting ferries. Nothing changed. The ferries ferried hornlessly.

Early in June, many residents in the luxury buildings overlooking the World Financial Center ferry terminal, in Battery Park City, were jolted awake at 6 A.M. by a clamor of honks. One of the tenants was a fifty-year-old German video-maker named Wolfgang Gabler, who lives with his wife and three children on the twenty-ninth floor of the Riverhouse. “I thought it was coming from the street,” he recalled recently. “Maybe it was taxi drivers going crazy.” The noise kept up all day. After a few more days of this, Gabler, out on a bicycle, realized that it was the ferries. Each time a boat backed out of the ferry port, the captain let loose one long blast of the horn, followed by three shorter blasts, which, according to Rule 34(a)(i), means “I am operating astern propulsion.” Between 6 and 6:30 A.M. alone, there were maybe a dozen ferries coming and going. “I am not able to describe this with words,” Gabler said. “Not all horns are equal. Some are more disturbing than others.”

The Gablers moved to New York last August, from Karlsruhe, Germany, and had chosen Battery Park City because of the quiet. “For months I never heard a horn, and now it’s the whole day long,” Gabler said. He and his neighbors registered their complaints and soon learned that maritime regulations required the horns, and that the ferry operators had disregarded these regulations for decades. The complaints of the kayakers had prompted the Coast Guard to crack down. “There wasn’t a dangerous situation or anything,” Gabler said. “It just started because this woman thinks this is important.”

The woman was Brous. “If you don’t want to live with the noises of the waterfront, don’t live on the waterfront,” she said last week. “I don’t doubt they’re making noise. But it’s not optional. It’s maritime regulations. It’s very selfish of people to request that ferry captains not follow safety regulations so they can sleep past 6 A.M. But this is the nature of the new waterfront, full of expensive housing.”

One of Gabler’s neighbors wrote a letter to Lenny Kinnear, a Coast Guard official who oversees ferry operations, which was featured on the neighborhood Web site Battery Park.TV: “Even in midsummer, it is extremely rare to see a single kayaker or sailboat under way anywhere near the terminal. Frankly, the ferries are, without any horns, already so noisy and smoky that they are incapable of surprising anybody. . . . The theoretical risk of somehow surprising this nonexistent, thrill-seeking novice insomniac kayaker someday—that is not nearly worth waking up hundreds of hardworking families every single morning. Please throttle back.” Kinnear responded, “Until the International Maritime Organization and the U.S. Congress change the rules, there is nothing I can do.”

The other morning, Gabler, in cargo shorts and a blue polo shirt, lingered down by the ferry dock. He’d made a film about the horns the day before and posted it on YouTube. The ferries came and went. The signal fanfare (beeeeeeeeep-beep-beep-beep) seemed harmless at first, but after forty minutes it began to fray the nerves, as though some middle schoolers with air horns were having a laugh. “Some of the captains use their horns very expressively,” Gabler said. “I think they do it for fun.” In between honks, one could hear the customary sounds of summer on the Battery: helicopters, sirens, the boats’ bumpers squeaking against the stanchions, flapping flip-flops, a Citibike bell, a Chinese tour guide on a megaphone, the thwok of a spaldeen. All this, and a tenant’s futile lament about noise.

Brous, meanwhile, had taken up the cause of keeping motorized vehicles off the bridges’ bike paths, and improving ambulance access to them. ♦

DEPT. OF PERSEVERANCE
Repeat Customer

by Jeffrey Toobin

In Ken Matsuzaki’s quest to pass the New York State bar exam, the seventeenth time was the charm. The test is offered twice a year, in February and July, and Matsuzaki had sat for every one since completing Cardozo law school, in early 2005. He’s taken the bar in Brooklyn, in Albany, in the vast Javits Center, in Manhattan (“I don’t like that one,” he said. “Lines too long at the bathrooms”), and, this past February, in Buffalo. “I like Buffalo,” he said. “Less crowded. I could reserve a hotel very close to the testing place. Just three minute walk from the hotel. Good access. I can focus on study during my stay. In New York City, many kinds of things attract me.”

Matsuzaki’s persistence is especially notable because he lives in Tokyo. He uses his vacation days to travel to New York, and his costs amount to about two thousand dollars a throw. (“I really owe my wife a lot. She has been very patient for me.”) What makes his dedication even more remarkable is that he has no professional obligation to be a lawyer in New York. In Tokyo, he works in the legal department of a large advertising agency, and he has no plans to practice law in New York or even to move here. By the end, his pursuit was mostly spiritual. “If I give up, maybe I would be betraying myself, so I don’t like to do such kind of thing,” Matsuzaki said. “I like one expression: ‘Constant dripping wears off a stone.’ Perseverance finally works.”

As every lawyer knows, the bar exam is a dubious exercise, measuring not so much the skills of law practice as the ability to cram. Still, failure is embarrassing, if not professionally crippling. Notable non-passers include First Ladies (Hillary Clinton), governors (Jerry Brown, Pete Wilson), big-city mayors (Ed Koch, Richard M. Daley, Antonio R. Villaraigosa), and hunks (John F. Kennedy, Jr.). All except Villaraigosa eventually passed on later attempts.

In part, Matsuzaki has used the tests as a way of paying tribute to a city and a state that had adopted him. He had fallen in love with New York on a brief trip when he was a young man, later studied at New York University, and was determined to go to law school in the city. “Cardozo is not so popular among Japanese people,” he said. “There are not so many non-Americans. That was good for me, because one of my purposes was to get familiar with American people.” But, as the years passed, his distance from the city made studying harder. Like many American law students, he took a bar-review class for his first try, back in 2005, but after that he studied on his own, during his free time in Japan. “The knowledge easily drops off your head,” he said. “I thought that it would be better to do it continuously. That’s why I took a total of seventeen times.” As he showed up for test after test, Matsuzaki began to recognize some of his fellow repeat customers. “But then I stopped seeing them, because eventually all of them passed,” he said.

For Matsuzaki, the stakes were never higher than his last attempt, in Buffalo. He knew that the requirements for foreign students were going to change the next time, to include courses in professional responsibility, which he had never studied. “This was the last chance for me,” he said. In May, he received an e-mail with the test results from the bar examiners in New York. “I was not so brave to open it,” he said. “May is a holiday in Japan, our holy time. In early May, I spent those days with my wife. I confessed to her that I couldn’t open it. I waited two days. Finally, on the Saturday after breakfast, I determined to push it, to open it, and there it was: congratulations. Finally, congratulations.” His celebration was modest. “The biggest difference is I can go back to an ordinary life,” Matsuzaki said.

The length of Matsuzaki’s journey was hardly record-breaking. According to John McAlary, the executive director of the New York State Board of Law Examiners, there are two people who have taken the test more than sixty times. Their stories, however, do not have Matsuzaki’s sweet conclusion. “They don’t come close,” McAlary said. ♦

THE FINANCIAL PAGE
E-Book vs. P-Book

by James Surowiecki

When Barnes & Noble announced, a couple of weeks ago, that its Nook division lost almost five hundred million dollars last year and that its C.E.O. was resigning, there was one obvious conclusion: the company was doomed. After all, the Nook was how B. & N. was going to compete with Apple and Amazon, and thrive in a future dominated by e-books. With the Nook’s failure, B. & N. looked like just another business anachronism, a chain of cavernous barns selling piles of outdated merchandise. Who went to a store anymore to buy a physical book?

But the hastily written obituaries left out some important facts. To begin with, B. & N.’s retail business still makes good money, and, though its sales fell last year, its profits actually rose. Its operations, thanks to better inventory management, are more efficient: it can make more money while selling fewer books. The Nook is the only part of the business that’s losing money. Being a book retailer isn’t easy—thanks, above all, to Amazon—but Borders’ bankruptcy, in 2011, left B. & N. without a major national competitor. “In this market, you could actually pick up market share simply because you’re the only major bookseller left,” John Tinker, a media analyst at the Maxim Group, told me. And B. & N. has generally avoided the expensive, long leases that can drain a retailer’s cash flow; many of its leases are short—which gives it flexibility in terms of moving or downsizing—and, since its stores generate foot traffic (which is good for surrounding stores), it has considerable leverage with landlords. B. & N., which still has more than six hundred retail stores (and six hundred and eighty-six college bookstores), also retains considerable leverage with publishers. As a recent report from the Codex Group showed, browsing in stores is still a far more common way of finding new books than either online search or social media. So publishers have a stake in B. & N.’s survival.

There are plenty of things B. & N. could do better, of course. Its Web site could be sportier. Its stores, publishing people gripe, are too cluttered, often with non-book merchandise, and don’t do a good enough job of showcasing its key product. (The demise of the Nook should help in this regard, since those giant Nook display booths took up a lot of floor space.) It might also be time for the firm to embrace more innovative ways of pricing and selling books; Peter Olson, the former C.E.O. of Random House, has suggested that B. & N. could bundle e-books and print copies, or offer volume discounts. Motivated, personalized customer service would also make a difference. The obvious model here is the experience at Apple’s retail stores. But B. & N. could also look closer to home. Independent bookstores are now thriving, thanks in large part to their close ties to both publishers and customers. “Stores that can help you not just find what you’re looking for but also help you discover books you haven’t heard of are still very valuable to readers,” says Daniel Raff, a management professor at Wharton who’s written an in-depth study of Borders and B. & N. This suggests that, instead of succumbing to the temptation to reinvent itself, B. & N. should focus on something truly radical: being a bookstore.

Of course, a lot of people consider this a hopeless strategy: in their view, physical books are “technologically obsolete,” and the book industry is heading down the path that the music industry took, where digital downloads decimated CD sales and put record stores out of business. It’s true that, between 2009 and 2011, e-book sales rose at triple-digit annual rates. But last year, according to industry trade groups, e-book sales rose just forty-four per cent. (They currently account for about a fifth of the total market.) This kind of deceleration in the growth rate isn’t what you’d expect if e-books were going to replace printed books anytime soon. In a recent survey by the Codex Group, ninety-seven per cent of people who read e-books said that they were still wedded to print, and only three per cent of frequent book buyers read only digital.

E-books obviously have certain advantages (like the fact that you can carry lots of them around with you), but for many book buyers their main appeal is that they’re cheaper. Against that, the Codex Group finds that people of all ages still prefer print for serious reading; e-book sales are dominated by genre fiction—“light reading.” This may be just a prejudice that will vanish as e-books become more common. But we do read things differently when they’re on a page rather than on a screen. A study this year found that people reading on a screen tended to skip around more and read less intensively, and plenty of research confirms that people tend to comprehend less of what they read on a screen. The differences are small, but they may explain the persistent appeal of paper. Indeed, hardcover sales rose last year by a hundred million dollars.

For many people, as a number of studies show, reading is a genuinely tactile experience—how a book feels and looks has a material impact on how we feel about reading. This isn’t necessarily Luddism or nostalgia. The truth is that the book is an exceptionally good piece of technology—easy to read, portable, durable, and inexpensive. Unlike the phase-change move toward digital that we saw in music, the transition to e-books is going to be slow; coexistence is more likely than conquest. The book isn’t obsolete. Barnes & Noble just needs to make sure it isn’t, either. ♦

AMERICAN CHRONICLES
Mentally Fit

Workouts at the brain gym.

by Patricia Marx

Do I seem smarter than I did a few weeks ago? Since then, I’ve spent many hours in front of my computer, challenged by crucially important questions, like which two butterflies of the five that flickered onscreen for seventy-nine milliseconds were the matching pair, whether the ripples that rippled across the little magenta square went this way or that way, and how many more drills I must complete before I’m smart enough to date Harold Bloom. Remember when we called these sorts of activity video games and yelled at our kids for playing them? Now we refer to them as brain exercises, and we hope and trust that our digital exertions will make us as mentally agile as teen-agers wielding M27 assault rifles in Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

Teen-agers, I said—not twenty-seven-year-olds. That’s because most neuroscientists believe that by our late twenties the speed of our mental processing has begun to ebb, and so has our attention prowess and our working memory—i.e., the scratch pad in our minds that allows us to remember information long enough to calculate the tip on the taxi fare or . . . wait, what was I saying? While it is consoling that our vocabulary improves over the years, and that we oldsters are better at big-picture thinking and are more empathetic, still, by the advanced age of twenty there is a very good chance that our prefrontal cortex (the brains of the brain, responsible for problem-solving, decision-making, and complex thought) has already begun to shrink. We humans, by the way, are the only animals whose brains are known to atrophy as we grow older, and—yay, us again—we are also sui generis in suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. As distinctions go, this may not be as auspicious as, say, the opposable thumb. Nor is it necessarily the first chapter of a story that ends with being found wandering through Central Park in your pajamas. I’m also not guaranteeing that this might not happen to you. At an Alzheimer’s Association conference in Boston last week, researchers described a newly coined condition called “subjective cognitive decline.” According to a front-page article in the Times about these ominous findings, “People with more concerns about memory and organizing ability were more likely to have amyloid, a key Alzheimer’s-related protein, in their brains.” For the time being, there is nothing we can do about the amyloids, but in the past few years scientists and entrepreneurs have been claiming that there are measures one can take to minimize, slow down, or even reverse cognitive decline. With my fingers crossed, I travelled around the country to meet some of these authorities and find out how I could turbocharge my brain.

As recently as a few decades ago, most biologists thought that the brain was fully formed during childhood and, like a photograph after it’s been developed, was doomed to degrade thereafter, with neurons (nerve cells) fading like pigment on paper until you succumbed to senility. Today, we regard Alzheimer’s and other dementias as diseases, rather than as a consequence of normal aging. Moreover, we now consider the brain to be as labile as a digital image in the hands of a Photoshop fiend. The three-pound, pinkish-gray wrinkly guck in your skull contains about a hundred billion neurons. Each neuron can hook up with up to ten thousand others; hence, there are at least a hundred trillion neural connections in your brain, which is more than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Not only does the brain have a lifelong ability to create new neurons; like a government with an unlimited highway budget, it has an endless capacity to build new roadways. Networks of linked neurons communicate chemically and electrically encoded data to one another (Hey, neuron, the keys are on the table) at junctures called synapses. Fresh neural trails are generated whenever we experience something new—learn the tango, try a liverwurst canapé, take a different route to work. Repeat the activity and the pathway will be reinforced. This is why London cabbies, whose job requires them to memorize a mesh of twenty-five thousand streets and thousands of landmarks, were found to have larger hippocampi than the city’s bus drivers, who are responsible for learning only a few routes. (The hippocampus plays a major role in memory.) The ability of the brain to establish new connections is called plasticity, and brain-fitness exercises are predicated on this mechanism. Working out has also been shown to revamp the brain and prevent it from shrinking. That’s enough science for now. Let’s get back to me.

Although the combination to my junior-high-school locker seems to be indelibly lodged in some handy nook of my temporal lobe, right next to Motown song lyrics, could it be that elsewhere in my head not everything is shipshape? It’s a pretty regular occurrence for me to leave my reading glasses God knows where or lose my train of thought or have trouble recalling the word “phlogiston”—and, egads, what happened to all that stuff I used to know about Charlemagne’s in-laws? In my darkest moments, I imagine that my friends are humoring me when they insist that their amnesiac lapses are no less alarming than mine. (“Have you ever squeezed toothpaste onto your contact lenses?” a friend asked triumphantly.) Am I, like so many of my gang, just another one of the “worried well”? (A 2011 survey found that baby boomers were more afraid of losing their memory than of death.) Should I get out a crossword? Learn to play bridge? Chew gum? Take a nap? Drink more coffee? Eat blueberries? Give up tofu? There are studies that tout the rejuvenating benefits that each of these undertakings has on the brain. What to do?

For starters, I visited the Cottage Center for Brain Fitness, in Santa Barbara, which is referred to as a “brain shop” by its founder and medical director, Kenneth Kosik. This establishment, set in a bungalow decorated with clients’ artwork, aims to reset or, at least, stall the cognitive-countdown clock in order to reduce your risk of decline, through a comprehensive program that includes exercise, physical therapy, massage, nutrition counselling, life coaching, software games, lectures, and other activities you might find at, say, senior-citizen day camp (cholesterol war, anyone?). Arriving in time for the dance-movement class, I joined a small circle of attendees as the instructor guided us through relaxation exercises (“We’ll just close our eyes and send our awareness to different parts of our bodies”) and games (“I’m going to make a shape with my whole body, and then I’ll turn to Sandy, whose job will be to copy the shape with her body”). There were three clients, ages sixty-eight, eighty-eight, and ninety. Kosik, a sixty-two-year-old with baby-blue eyes and thinning hair, told me that he’d like to attract more people in their forties and fifties, which he regards as the optimal age for thwarting cerebral enfeeblement. Before I undergo a few neuropsychological tests, administered by the center’s integrative therapist, permit me another science-y interlude to explain how the brain is able to countervail the effects of aging—to some extent, and for only a limited period of time.

The notion that we can affect the resilience of our brain by investing in it early on, banking mental health as if it were a 401(k)—to borrow an analogy from Sherrie All, another psychologist I met with—hinges on the widely accepted theories of brain reserve and cognitive reserve. Kosik explained these two kindred concepts to me during a rapid discourse that he called “The History of Alzheimer’s in Thirty Seconds,” which lasted about half an hour. Here’s the short version: In 1988, several autopsies of elderly people revealed that, despite the presence in their brains of pathologies associated with Alzheimer’s disease, these individuals, in life, had displayed no symptoms of dementia. It has been hypothesized that they’d been buffered from the effects of the disease by the extra neuronal capacity that they had been born with (brain reserve) or that had accrued through years of intellectual and physical pursuits (cognitive reserve). Similarly, a study of six hundred and seventy-eight elderly nuns analyzed essays they’d written in their twenties and found that the sisters who had used the most linguistically complex sentences tended to have the lowest incidence of Alzheimer’s, which is why I’ve added this unnecessary subordinate clause even though it’s been a long time since I was in my twenties. How is it that certain minds seem able to forestall senescence despite genetic programming? The damage to the brain caused by Alzheimer’s can be compared to traffic jams caused by tractor-trailer accidents. Someone who has a robust neural network can find ways around these obstructions using back roads.

With this in mind, I was happy to hear that I aced the tests I took. I think you would, too, if, for instance, you know the answer to the question “What city are we in?,” can figure out what a banana and an orange have in common, copy a drawing of a cube, and have no trouble recognizing a rhinoceros. On the other hand, as Kosik said during my evaluation, compared with the diagnostic acumen of computer-based testing, “every pencil-and-paper test is a blunt instrument.” Kosik is part of a team that is developing an Alzheimer’s-prevention drug now being tested on members of an extended family in the vicinity of Medellín, Colombia, whose mutated genes doom them to an especially virulent form of dementia that can show up in their brains as early as age thirty. In most cases, he said, heredity is not so deterministic. “Everyone can name at least six reasons why you should eat sensibly, reduce stress, and exercise,” Kosik said. “Now there is a seventh.” If you are middle-aged, managing your blood pressure, according to Kosik, is probably the best measure you can take to minimize your risk of vascular dementia—the second most prevalent type of dementia, after Alzheimer’s. Kosik is also emphatic about the benefits of social interaction, citing a study that found that isolation among seniors was linked with cognitive impairment. (Party on!) “I’m sure some of my colleagues in Boston”—Kosik was previously at Harvard and Tufts—“would look at this as a fringe operation, a storefront with walnuts and incense,” he said of the Cottage Center. “On the other hand,” he continued, “we can wait for science to come up with a cure or we can jump in and try to create an atmosphere that is conducive to good brain health.”

Next, I stopped at the Brain Health Center, in San Francisco. I had to reschedule my phone appointment with Louisa Parks, a clinical neuropsychologist and brain coach, who teaches memory tricks to patients with cognitive deficits, because I forgot to call her. Remembering to remember is called prospective memory, and one technique Parks recommends for triggering it is to link the item that’s threatening to vaporize in your mind with another that’s more rooted in your consciousness. That is to say, put your house keys in the refrigerator next to your corned-beef sandwich (and then remember which to eat). Parks leads six-week sessions with groups of clients, offering them tactics like these.

Parks hypothesized that, while I don’t have a recall problem, I could brush up on focussing my attention. Before I could celebrate, she said that pretty much everyone has an attention problem, especially these days, when—stop checking your e-mail!—there are so many distractions. The act of remembering, she said, has three stages: encoding, storage, and retrieval. The second we can’t control, and the third, barring a stroke or a neurological disease, depends on the first. If the proper information isn’t inputted into the machine, as it were, then good luck getting it outputted. Parks recommends mindfulness training. This is a variation on Buddhist meditation, in which the practitioner learns to pay attention selectively and, as she put it, “to remain in the present, rather than to wallow and worry about the past and catastrophize the future.” She guided me through an exercise that involved devoting my thoughts exclusively to my breath (not daydreaming about whether I’m out of paper towels). If one masters single-minded breathing, a theory has it, one will also become adept at concentrating on non-respiratory concerns. I am not good at breathing. Many years ago, at a spa, I was yelled at for not breathing correctly, but that’s another story.

Guess what else I’m bad at? Anxiety management. This was more or less the conclusion of the online Brain Fitness Check-up I underwent, which was designed by a Washington, D.C.-based company called NeoCORTA. The checkup consists of a very long questionnaire that takes about half an hour to complete. Most of the questions are in the form of statements that you must respond to on a scale of “very poor” to “very good.” For example: “My ability to remember grocery items without consulting a list is . . . ,” “My ability to follow a map to a new location is . . .” There are also questions you’ve been asked a million times before on forms, like how many servings of fruits and vegetables do you eat per day?, and others that I bet you will encounter for the first time, such as “I notice and hear sounds around me, just as others do.” Based on my answers, NeoCORTA recommended a Personal Action Plan, whose suggested activities included Tai Chi and volunteer work. The NeoCORTA Web site claims that the company’s test is “the quickest, easiest way to begin the brain fitness journey.” (How I wish that sentence had ended with “journey to the Amalfi Coast.”)

Why is being a nervous wreck so bad for the brain? To find out, I spent a calming day at the Chicago Center for Cognitive Wellness, a two-room suite in a building in Evanston, Illinois, above the World of Beer. The clinic, founded by a psychologist named Sherrie All, and jointly run by her and her associate, Jennifer Medina, offers one-on-one cognitive-wellness coaching, in which stress reduction plays a big part. (Fermented beverages are not involved.) “Americans are fat and sedentary, and we’re stressed out, and none of that is good for our brains,” All said. “That’s why I developed my holistic approach.” All hopes to open a chain of brain spas, a hard venture to pull off, because most insurance companies don’t cover this type of preventive care, and because many people are not aware of the potential benefits. “We get discouraged about the market, but fifty or sixty years ago there wasn’t a physical-fitness industry,” she said.

Under her supervision, I took another battery of tests. If the rate at which I’m able to strike the computer space bar during a thirty-second interval is a meaningful measure, then I could use a little remedial help on my motor tapping skills. (So long, drumming career.) After I’d repeatedly pressed the left arrow and the right arrow, depending on whether an onscreen dot turned red or green, and after I recognized the emotions on a series of line-drawn faces (I confused “disgust” and “anger”), and after I pressed the space bar whenever I saw the word “press” if the letters were green and not if the letters were red, Medina and I met in the therapy room (brown sofa, brown rug), where we talked about the evolutionary reasons for stress, which she referred to as Dr. Evil, and how it affects our memories. To recap: sometimes stress is good. As anyone who has ever had to fend off a woolly-mammoth attack will tell you, the hormonal cascade that is generated in a state of emergency by your body’s sympathetic nervous system—the so-called fight-or-flight response—empowers you to act with preternatural energy and vigilance. “Fast-forward hundreds of thousands of years, and we don’t have to fight predators for our food,” Medina said. We still have a fight-or-flight response, “but it’s not purposeful when you’re standing in line waiting for the clerk to hurry up.” When stress is long-lasting, it is like using a nuclear reactor to operate your hair dryer. After being persistently bombarded by cortisol, neurons eventually wither and your hippocampus shrivels. The end.

Well, not so fast, says the team at Heartmath, a company that sells stress-reducing devices that are designed to teach you Inner Balance™, give you a more positive outlook, increase mental clarity, and improve your memory. All you have to do is clamp a pulse sensor to your ear and think happy thoughts. The product that I sampled is called emWave Desktop. This is a software program that translates information about your heart rate as it is being collected by the ear thingamajig, and displays the data on your computer in the form of animated graphs, sine curves, and inspirational scenes of plants sprouting in a garden, gold filling a pot at the end of a rainbow, an oversized child radiating psychedelically colored light beams toward planet Earth, and the like. It is a G.P.S. for the soul. The goal is to achieve maximum coherence. According to Rollin McCraty, the director of research at Heartmath’s academic arm, coherence “is a state that builds resiliency—personal energy is accumulated, not wasted.” Got that? Seeking enlightenment, I spent a few hours on the phone with Gaby Boehmer, the company’s director of public relations, and Tom Beckman, a biomedical engineer by training, whose responsibilities at Heartmath include instructing health-care professionals in the use of emWave. “It is like building emotional muscle,” Boehmer told me. “When you are in a state of coherence, the heart and brain and nervous system are working synchronistically,” Beckman added. Apparently, you reach a state of heart-rhythm coherence when you’re feeling positive emotions. “The reason we focus on the heart to facilitate brain fitness is because the heart is sending more information to the brain than vice versa,” Beckman said. During my emWave tutorial, I was advised to focus on the center of my chest and reëxperience a positive feeling, by recalling, for instance, a special place or pet. The best I could do was fantasize about finishing the emWave session. It did the trick. My heart was so well behaved that the little thermometer in the corner of my screen registered green seventy-seven per cent of the time, and Beckman said, “Good job. I’m impressed with your coherence.”

To everyone who has solved today’s crossword puzzle: Sorry, but that is no guarantee that you will end up less nutty than the rest of us. Alvaro Fernandez, the C.E.O. of SharpBrains, a market-research firm concerned with brain health, told me, “Once someone has done hundreds or thousands of them, the marginal benefit tends toward zero, because it becomes just another routine, easy activity—probably a bit more stimulating and effortful than watching TV, but not enough to bring benefits other than becoming a master at crossword puzzles.” If you’re practiced enough to know that an auk is a diving seabird, it’s time to learn sign language or take up the tuba. Fernandez, like many others, recommends engaging in unfamiliar challenges. If you take this counsel to the extreme, there is neurobics, the mental-calisthenics regimen popularized by Lawrence Katz and Manning Rubin in their book “Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss and Increase Mental Fitness” (1999). In order to qualify as a neurobics exercise, a task must “involve one or more of your senses in a novel context” and “break a routine in an unexpected, nontrivial way.” Guess which exercise among the following was not conceived of by Katz and Rubin: shower with your eyes closed, brush your teeth with your nondominant hand, wear earplugs to your family breakfast, wear mittens while driving, turn your family photos upside down, shop at an ethnic market, eat waffles for dinner. Answer: they are all bona-fide neurobic exercises.

Staving off dotage is not cheap. According to a recent report issued by SharpBrains, the amount spent on brain fitness in 2012 was more than a billion dollars, and by 2020, it is estimated, that figure will exceed six billion dollars. Most of the merchandise is some kind of software.

Adam Gazzaley is a neuroscientist and the co-founder of Akili Interactive Labs, an outfit that is hoping to develop the first therapeutic F.D.A.-approved video games. “Brain fitness of tomorrow will be created in rooms like this,” he told me, during a tour of the neuroimaging center that he directs at the University of California, San Francisco. The Virtual Simulation room was so minimally appointed—a couple of flat screens and a few headsets with electrodes lay about—that it looked as if it had been burglarized. “We’re developing neural stimulation, including T.D.C.S.”—transcranial direct-current stimulation”—and hoping to integrate them into a multimodal approach that rewires the circuits of the brain.” In other words, the video game of the future will not only sense what is going on in your brain but also make your brain more plastic by shooting electricity through it. Remember when your mother told you not to sit too close to the TV? Now you’re part of the TV.

I have read studies in which it was concluded that playing brain games improves your working memory, sharpens your attention, builds your fluid intelligence (the ability to solve novel problems and think logically), boosts your I.Q., rolls back the clock ten years in terms of memory performance, delays mental decline by seven years, decreases your risk of an automobile crash, revs up skills that would make you a more reliable air-traffic controller, and makes you much sexier (not really). I have also read studies that disputed each of these studies. Fernandez, of SharpBrains, told me, “If you find a game that addresses a relevant cognitive or emotional bottleneck, you can make a difference in your quality of life in ten to fifteen hours of training.”

Which to choose? To name just a few: Cogmed, Lumosity, Brain Games, Jungle Memory, CogniFit, MindSparke, MyBrainSolutions, Brain Spa, brainTivity, Brainiversity, Brain Metrix, Mind Quiz: Your Brain Coach, Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima, Nintendo’s Brain Age, MindHabits, NeuroNation, HAPPYneuron. There seem to be enough products to give each of your synapses its very own personal-training program. They vary in price (many are free; Lumosity is a subscription that costs fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents a month; Cogmed costs around fifteen hundred dollars, which entitles you to a five-week coach-supervised session and access to twelve games); intended customer (e.g., Dakim BrainFitness is meant for people over sixty); and purpose (some emphasize particular brain functions, such as working memory or emotional regulation; others are more all-encompassing).

I chose BrainHQ, a platform offered by Posit Science, a San Francisco company, which was one of the first to enter the brain-fitness realm. Posit was co-founded in 2003 by Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist. The program specializes in speeding up the rate at which the user processes information, making your brain operate more like I.B.M.’s Watson supercomputer than like my laptop. “Why do you lose your memory?” Merzenich asked. “You don’t forget because the brain has forgotten to remember. You lose your memory because the brain is representing the things you are seeing and hearing and feeling less saliently. When you’re young and you see something surprising, your eyes are attracted to it. You are bright-eyed, literally. Your eyes take a series of snapshots that reveal information about what’s out there. Seventy-year-olds might not see what’s there, and if they do see it they’ll turn their whole heads and stare, instead of darting their eyes.” Merzenich went on to explain that the peripheral vision of a sixty-year-old is only three-quarters as panoramic as that of a twenty-year-old. “We want to train your eyes to be more childlike,” he continued. “We can take a person at any age and restore their sparkiness.” Merzenich told me that recent findings have shown that a Posit program similar to the one I’d be trying effectively reversed cognitive aging by eleven years, on average, after only ten hours of training. Great! If I complete the program a bunch of times, I can find out who I was in a previous life.

I trained for an hour a day over a six-week stretch (thirty minutes a day is customary, but I was on an accelerated schedule). In all, there were fifteen exercises. Some, like Target Tracker, were meant to augment attention. A number of identical jellyfish appeared onscreen, followed by a fluther of more identical jellyfish, all of them moving as if they were playing musical chairs. When they stopped, I was asked to pinpoint the original bunch. When I graduated to higher levels of the exercise, the jellyfish moved faster and became more translucent. When I beat a benchmark I’d previously set, fireworks exploded. I’m ashamed to admit how proud I felt. On the other hand, an alertness exercise, Freeze Frame, rattled me so much that I considered giving the emWave a second chance. It entailed unhesitatingly tapping the space bar sometimes and refraining from pressing the space bar at other times, depending on which photograph flitted across the screen. One of the toughest tests was Card Shark, a version of the classic n-back test, whereby the subject is presented with a sequence of items—in this case, playing cards—and asked to indicate when the current card matches the one n steps back. The n-back is a memory-building tool that has been shown to raise I.Q. Among the many tests that I genuinely liked was Recognition, a People Skills exercise in which a face, cropped at the hairline, is flashed onscreen for a few milliseconds, after which you must select the one you saw from an array of faces. As you progress in this task, the angle of the faces becomes more oblique, the number of faces in the grid increases, and the target face appears for shorter bursts—a virtual speed cocktail party, but without the crostini and the mojitos.

How did I fare over all in this self-help adventure? Judging from the series of questionnaires I filled out during the course of my training, my mood brightened, my sleep was more restful, and I felt more confident. I may also have become a bigger liar on questionnaires, but that was not evaluated. As for the exercises, my scores were higher across the board. In an e-mail summing up my progress, Merzenich wrote, “Your advances on these exercises come from brain remodeling. If we had recorded from/imaged your brain before and after training, we could have easily shown that you now have a ‘better’ (stronger, faster, more reliable, more accurate) brain.” (Wouldn’t they make dandy wallet photos?) Compared with my poky old brain, my souped-up brain, according to Merzenich, has more synapses, better wiring, stronger connections, and more forceful activity. (Doesn’t that sound like an ad for a five-thousand-dollar stereo?) He said that my enhanced brainpower should last several years, after which I could “slip back past the neurological position that you were at when you began this training.”

I’m not sure I noticed my newfound cognitive abilities in my everyday life. It’s hard to be both scientist and lab rat. On the positive side, I am slightly less troubled about the size of my hippocampus. On the negative side, why did I sprinkle NutraSweet on my broiled salmon last night? ♦

A CRITIC AT LARGE
Othello’s Daughter

The rich legacy of Ira Aldridge, the pioneering black Shakespearean.

by Alex Ross

In 1896, a thirty-six-year-old opera singer named Luranah Aldridge travelled to Germany to prepare for performances of Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung,” at the Bayreuth Festival. Dozens of young singers had made such a journey before her: thirteen years after Wagner’s death, Bayreuth had become a summit of the operatic world. Aldridge, though, was of mixed race: an English native, she was the daughter of an African-American and a Swede. The casting of a nonwhite performer in Wagner’s Nordic-Teutonic saga might have been expected to arouse opposition, given the notorious racism of the composer and many of his followers, yet an advance guide to the 1896 festival treats Aldridge simply as a promising novelty:

A name that may well ring strangely in the ears of even the most observant art lovers is that of Luranah Aldridge, who will sing one of the eight Valkyries. Of Luranah Aldridge one cannot say that she did not come from far off, as she hails—from Africa. She is the daughter of the African tragedian Ira Aldridge and studied singing in Germany, England and France, and has appeared with great success in operas and concerts outside of Germany. She is praised as the possessor of a true contralto voice with a wide range. In the course of the festival there will be an opportunity to put these statements to the test.

The singer fell sick during rehearsals and did not perform that summer. Despite encouragement from Cosima Wagner, the composer’s widow, Aldridge faded from view. A few reference works mention her; otherwise, she has vanished from the historical record.

Not long ago, I stumbled upon the passage quoted above, and decided that the apparition of a mixed-race singer at Bayreuth six decades before Grace Bumbry officially broke the color barrier, in 1961, was a mystery worth exploring. I delved into archives, piecing together fragments of a forgotten life. I soon realized that I could not understand Luranah without understanding her remarkable father. Ira Aldridge, a New Yorker who moved to England when he was in his teens, achieved immense fame in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, mesmerizing kings, emperors, and, it would seem, Richard Wagner with his renditions of Shakespeare. He is now much more obscure, although a dramatization of his life, by Lolita Chakrabarti, won notice in London last year, and will come to St. Ann’s Warehouse in March. In recent years, the scholar Bernth Lindfors has published a two-volume biography of the actor and compiled a book of essays about him, revealing the paradoxes of a man who falsified his biography, toyed with audiences, and undermined the racial assumptions of his age. Lindfors calls Aldridge “the most visible black man in a white world in the middle of the nineteenth century.” Three of his children were musicians; music must have seemed the next world for the Aldridge clan to conquer.

The leaders of the New Negro movement of the early twentieth century took pride in the fact that a black performer had breached the citadels of European culture. Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson celebrated Ira; W. E. B. Du Bois inducted him into the Talented Tenth—that company of exceptional individuals who were to lead the black population to salvation. Admittedly, Aldridge’s success did little to change the fundamental dynamics of racial hatred. Even if his performances of Shakespeare—or, for that matter, his daughter’s singing of Wagner—momentarily caused white people to rethink their ideas about the inferiority of other races, the epiphany didn’t stick. Still, such singular careers demonstrate what is possible, even if it remains improbable. Looking into the faces of Ira and Luranah, you see something more than talent: you sense an imperious disbelief in what passes for reality.

African-Americans who crossed the Atlantic in the nineteenth century found themselves in a markedly less hostile world. Racism ran through every sector of society and infected the highest minds of the age, yet the animus against people of color lacked the state-sanctioned viciousness of its American equivalent, at least on European soil. Slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833; Prussia outlawed serfdom in 1807. In theory, one could go where one wanted and do as one wished. Black people were, for the most part, unthreatening curiosities; those who displayed intellectual distinction tended to arouse wonder rather than resentment. Du Bois, a Massachusetts native, recalled that when he went to Berlin to study political economy, in 1892, he felt, for the first time, truly free. “I began to realize that white people were human,” he said.

Ira Aldridge was born in Manhattan in 1807. His family belonged to the world of the “quasi-free,” to take a phrase from the historian John Hope Franklin. Slavery was gradually being abolished in New York, but the black population was hemmed in by Jim Crow-like restrictions—notably, drastic limits on voting rights. Aldridge’s father, Daniel, worked as a street vender and served as a lay preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church; his mother, of whom almost nothing is known, was named Luranah. Aldridge’s early education took place at the African Free School, a network of schools set up by antislavery advocates to educate “the descendants of an injured race.” Daniel Aldridge wanted his son to be a minister, but Ira fell in love with the theatre.

In his teens, he caught a rare opportunity. From 1821 to 1823, an impresario named William Brown ran the African Theatre, the first African-American theatre company. All-black productions of “Richard III,” “Othello,” and other plays were presented in downtown Manhattan. Brown did not have an easy time: neighbors complained, the police intervened, a competitor sent in gangs of thugs, and the newspaper editor Mordecai Manuel Noah, who also happened to be the sheriff of New York, mocked the effort by printing spoofs in black dialect. (Noah, at the time one of very few Jewish figures in American politics, might have known better than to indulge in racial stereotyping.) Aldridge played several roles and apparently took part in street fights that erupted in response to the venture. The violence foreshadowed the anti-abolitionist riots of 1834, which devastated black homes, churches, and businesses. If Aldridge had remained in America, his acting career would surely have gone nowhere.

Aldridge reached England with the assistance of two acting brothers named Wallack. In May, 1825, he made his London début, playing Othello at the Royalty Theatre, a low-profile establishment in the East End. A critic chided this “Gentleman of Colour lately arrived from America” for his unreliable delivery of the text, but concluded that “his death was certainly one of the finest physical representations of bodily anguish we ever witnessed.” Aldridge was seventeen.

A curious twist boosted his rise. In the early eighteen-twenties, Charles Mathews, an English comedian known for his one-man entertainments, came into contact with James Hewlett, the star of the African Theatre. Although Mathews never saw the company in person, he burlesqued it in a wildly successful solo show, “Trip to America,” in 1824. In one skit, a black actor delivered a garbled version of “To be or not to be,” changing the line “by opposing end them” to “by opossum end ’em.” In Mathews’s telling, when the audience heard this, it began yelling for the popular song “Opossum Up a Gum Tree,” which the actor then performed. As the scholar Marvin McAllister has argued, the emerging phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy, which Mathews helped inspire, was in part a “metaphorical assault” on the aspirations of black actors.

When Aldridge began performing at the more upscale Royal Coburg Theatre, patrons anticipated a replica of Mathews’s malapropist bungler. One paper provided this preview: “Theatrical dogs, horses, and elephants have passed away;—those of monkeys seem to be on the decline, and now for a more monstrous exhibition than all the rest, we are to be treated with a Black Actor, a right earnest African Tragedian.” Instead, audiences encountered a performer of skill and refinement. Lindfors suggests that they were “left with a chastened appreciation of black virtuosity.” Aldridge enthralled his public not with a roaring voice or wild gestures but with a carefully controlled dramatic arc. His Othello evolved by degrees from a façade of aristocratic composure to explosions of raw feeling.

On tour, Aldridge liked to follow “Othello” with “The Padlock,” a popular late-eighteenth-century comedy that featured a bumbling, drunken, singing-and-dancing black servant named Mungo. With this juxtaposition, Lindfors proposes, Aldridge made audiences aware of the artificiality of stereotypes, while also indulging their—and his—love for low humor. He later incorporated “Opossum Up a Gum Tree” into “The Padlock,” appropriating Mathews’s appropriation. Lindfors believes that Aldridge was engaging in creative subversion, whereas other scholars see a mercenary capitulation to the marketplace; in any case, the effect must have been dizzying.

Aldridge took on other dark-skinned roles that were popular on European stages at the time. These included Oroonoko, an enslaved African prince who suffers in his love for a white woman (“There is no mean, but death, or liberty”); Gambia, a slave who wins freedom by defending his masters (“Liberty! give me the language of gods, to tell that I am free!”); and assorted villains bent on vengeance. The actor sometimes rewrote his parts to make them more sympathetic or complex. When, in 1849, Aldridge played Aaron the Moor in an adaptation of “Titus Andronicus,” a hate-fuelled character became virtuous.

Elegant delivery aside, Aldridge did not stint on showmanship, travelling from town to town in a fancy carriage and indulging freely in public-relations hokum. He began claiming to be the descendant of a princely Fula line, and in later years spread the fiction that he had been born in Senegal. He also called himself the African Roscius, after a famous actor of ancient Rome. In 1825, he married Margaret Gill, of Yorkshire, but there were other women, all apparently white, and four of his six children—including Luranah, the future Wagner singer—were illegitimate. In America, Aldridge’s private life would have been as uncommon as his public one, and far more dangerous.

Such a flamboyant character could not avoid making enemies. In 1833, the Theatre Royal, in Covent Garden, offered Aldridge a short run in “Othello,” and much of the London press made a project of taking him down. The Figaro in London launched a breathtakingly vile campaign, promising to inflict on Aldridge “such a chastisement as must drive him from the stage he has dishonoured, and force him to find in the capacity of footman or street-sweeper, that level for which his colour appears to have rendered him peculiarly qualified.” The Athenaeum was scandalized to see Ellen Tree, the Desdemona, “being pawed about” by a black man. Afterward, the Figaro boasted of having “hunted the Nigger from the boards.”

Even those who praised Aldridge almost always framed him in racial terms, as Lindfors’s citations of reviewers show. “Away flew all our pre conceived notions and prejudices,” one said. Another declared, “The only real difference between an African and a European, is in the colour of the skin. The mind, the soul, the heart, are the same.” In 1831, a young woman named Miss Smedley composed a poem in Aldridge’s honor:

O may thy tongue indeed prophetic be,

And England loose the chain of Slavery,

That long hath bound the Negro’s energy,

Then shall his mind be like his body—“Free!”

At times, Aldridge articulated a political agenda, saying that he wished to “assert the claims of my kind to equality of intellect and right feeling with the more favoured portion of the human race.” He was hardly a radical, though. As Lindfors notes, he “made a compelling case for both the abolition of slavery and the advancement of the colonial enterprise.” His Senegalese deception erased his American upbringing and cast him as an exotic, almost magical being.

After the Covent Garden setback, Aldridge retreated to the provinces, and in Ireland, among other places, he became a full-on star, his popularity only heightened by stories of Londoners’ disdain. (In the writings of Thomas Carlyle, among others, the Irish were considered just a step above blacks.) In a high-flown address at the end of one of his Dublin runs, Aldridge flattered his audience by characterizing them as freedom fighters: “Here the sable African was free (cheers) / From every bond, save those which kindness threw / Around his heart, and bound it fast to you.”

In 1835, seeking to maximize his mobility, Aldridge put together a solo entertainment that mixed lectures on drama, recitations of Shakespeare, commentary on racism, and popular songs. And he kept up his meta-racial games. In the same period, the American blackface entertainer Thomas Rice toured England with his notorious “Jim Crow” act; back home, he bragged of having convinced the British of the inferiority of blacks. Aldridge promptly added a version of Rice’s routine to his one-man show. He also parodied parodies of himself, reciting Shakespeare in mangled English. His most provocative move was to answer blackface by putting on whiteface. His repertory included Richard III, Rob Roy, a Russian who disguises himself as a Moor, and, in one skit, a Bavarian maid.

Aldridge might have finished his career on the provincial circuit, but in 1852 he ventured out on a Continental tour, bringing with him a troupe of British actors. In Germany, he found himself the subject of mass adulation, with full houses greeting him in each town and critics vying with one another to invent superlatives. One critic suggested that Aldridge might be “the greatest of all actors.” Another said that “since the time of the ancient kings of the Athenian stage no one has seen anything like it.” Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the King of Prussia, conferred on Aldridge a Gold Medal for Art and Science; Emperor Franz Josef of Austria gave him the Grand Cross of the Order of Leopold. Numerous other honors followed. His most impressive title was Chevalier Ira Aldridge, Knight of Saxony, and he did not hesitate to use it.

Richard Wagner, who idolized Shakespeare, was most likely an Aldridge admirer. In 1857, Aldridge went to Zurich, where Wagner was living, having taken refuge in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848 and 1849. Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck, the muse of “Tristan und Isolde,” “Wednesday: Othello Ira Aldridge. Tickets to be booked in a timely fashion.” There is no reason to think that he did not go; several of his Zurich associates were in attendance that night, including the leftist poet Georg Herwegh, who wrote a rave review. In the period of the Harlem Renaissance, the potential link between Aldridge and Wagner drew notice; Langston Hughes, who once placed “Tristan” on a list of his favorite things, mentioned Wagner’s interest in his 1954 children’s book, “Famous American Negroes.”

The German enthusiasm for Aldridge may seem strange, given the contemporary tendency to view nineteenth-century German culture as a continuous crescendo toward the racial hatred of the Nazi era. Indeed, the religiously based bigotry of prior eras was giving way to pseudo-scientific theories on the inequality of races, which Wagner helped to promote. Yet German thought contained other, more egalitarian strains, going back to Johann Gottfried Herder, who, in his “Negro Idylls,” of 1797, adopted the point of view of oppressed African peoples. Similar sympathies surfaced among the revolutionaries of 1848, more than a few of whom fled to America and became active in the abolitionist cause. Quentin Tarantino’s depiction, in his recent film “Django Unchained,” of an alliance between a German adventurer and a black American is not as absurd as audiences might assume.

Wagner’s own remarks about black people, as recorded in Cosima’s diaries, vacillate between disdain and a surprising sympathy. During the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, he speaks admiringly of Cetshwayo, the Zulu leader, and announces that “the Zulus are also human beings like ourselves.” If only he had grasped the same about the Jews.

In 1858, Aldridge went to Russia, where, unexpectedly, his fame reached its zenith. It’s difficult to judge Russian descriptions of his acting, since by this time he was performing with a troupe of Germans, who recited in German while he carried on in English. The spectacle must have been more visual than verbal. Nonetheless, Aldridge cast his usual spell, especially in progressive circles. One critic wrote, “From Othello is torn the deep cry, ‘Oh misery, misery, misery!’ and in that misery of the African artist is heard the far-off groans of his own people, oppressed by unbelievable slavery and more than that—the groans of the whole of suffering mankind.” When Aldridge played Shylock, he was understood to be creating a compound study in racial adversity:

Ira Aldridge is a mulatto born in America and feels deeply the insults levelled at people of another colour by people of a white colour in the New World. In Shylock he does not see particularly a Jew, but a human being in general, oppressed by the age-old hatred shown towards people like him, and expressing this feeling with wonderful power and truth. . . . His very silences speak.

Toward the end of his career, Aldridge began to escape the racial frame in which he had been confined. In the late eighteen-fifties, his Macbeth, which one critic described as a “terrible battle of noble-mindedness with the demon of ambition,” made a strong impression on Georg, the future Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, whose acting company decisively influenced late-nineteenth-century theatre. The French poet and critic Théophile Gautier saw Aldridge in the role of King Lear, and marvelled at the actor’s impersonation of old age. Errol Hill, in his 1984 book, “Shakespeare in Sable,” proposes that Aldridge deserves credit for introducing greater naturalism into the Victorian theatre.

Thanks to his European sojourns, Aldridge acquired enough wealth to buy a home in London near the Crystal Palace—on Hamlet Road, no less—and other property nearby. While Margaret, his first wife, underwent a physical decline, he formed a relationship with Amanda Brandt, a Swedish-born singer who shared his habit of self-aggrandizing fictions: she claimed, falsely, to be a baroness. They were married in 1865, a year after Margaret’s death.

Nearing the age of sixty, Aldridge had one more mighty gesture in mind. In the summer of 1867, while on tour in Poland, he negotiated terms for an American tour, which would have involved a hundred performances across the country, beginning at the Academy of Music, near Union Square. Sizable fees were set, although, Aldridge advised, “the expenses of the Baroness Aldridge would be borne by me.” Performing Shakespeare in post-Civil War America would almost certainly have stirred up more opposition than Aldridge had lately been accustomed to. “A novel sensation is in store for our politicians, humanitarians, ethnologists and critics,” the Times said, seeming to sneer in anticipation.

A week before he was to sail, Aldridge fell fatally sick, possibly as a result of a lung condition. He died in Lodz on August 7, 1867, and was buried there, amid such pomp as befitted the first and last black Knight of Saxony.

Great performers are often poor parents, and it may not be a coincidence that only one of Aldridge’s children had a long and relatively happy life. Ira Daniel, his oldest, went to Australia, failed at acting, and descended into a life of crime. At the age of twenty-four, Ira Frederick, after showing promise as a pianist, composer, and conductor, flung himself from a window in a state of delirium. Amanda, a singer, composer, and teacher, was the survivor, finding a modest place in the London music scene. Her vocal students included Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, and Paul Robeson—three history-making black performers of the early twentieth century.

The story of Luranah, Ira’s most gifted child, borders on tragedy. The best evidence of her life can be found in her sister’s papers, at Northwestern University. There is also a passage about her in Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock’s 1958 biography of Ira, which draws on interviews with Amanda; they call Luranah “a strong-willed, dominating and pleasure-loving woman.” She was born in 1860, attended a convent school in Ghent, and studied in London, Berlin, and Paris. Her early reviews were encouraging; a Hamburg critic praised her “strong, darkly colored instrument, well developed in the lower register.” Charles Gounod, the renowned composer of “Faust,” recommended her effusively to Augustus Harris, the impresario of opera at Covent Garden: “Do you want to hear one of the most beautiful voices that exist? Very well! Give an audition to Mademoiselle Luranah Aldridge.”

Harris featured Luranah in a Grand Wagner Orchestral Concert at St. James’s Hall in 1893, and the same year cast her as one of the Valkyries in the “Ring.” She sang again in “Ring” cycles in London in 1898 and 1905. Elsewhere, she evidently essayed the bigger role of Erda, the earth goddess of the “Ring,” for the Aldridge collection contains a photograph of the Russian-born soprano Félia Litvinne, attired as Brünnhilde, with the inscription “à mon Erda.” In her own portraits, Luranah has no trouble adopting a grand pose, her head tilted back and her eyebrows imperiously arched.

At the end of the nineteenth century, there was no more powerful woman in music than Cosima Wagner, who had assumed the direction of Bayreuth after her husband’s death, in 1883. The illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt and the leftist historian Marie d’Agoult, the Meisterin, as she was known, was a person of monumental will and fierce intelligence. George Eliot called her a genius, adding that Richard resembled a petty grocer. Yet Cosima was no less bigoted than her husband, and considerably more rigid in her artistic thinking.

Luranah auditioned for Cosima in late 1895 or early 1896, and was cast in that summer’s “Ring”—the first Bayreuth production of the cycle since the inaugural festival of 1876. Sometime in the spring, Luranah went to Bayreuth, to take part in rehearsals. When she fell ill, she repaired to a spa in Rupprechtstegen, not far from Bayreuth. It was an expensive place, for which Cosima probably paid the bill. Eva Wagner, one of Richard and Cosima’s children, wrote to her on May 30th, “Mama and we all were happy to get good news from you, and we hope that every day will be a progress! Mama spoke immediately to Mr. v. Gross, who surely meanwhile will have fulfilled your wish.” (Adolf von Gross was Bayreuth’s business manager.) The familiar tone of Eva’s note bears out Marshall and Stock’s claim that the singer became close to the Wagner family—indeed, that she stayed for a time in Wahnfried, the Wagner home.

The idea of a woman of color consorting with the Wagners is disorienting. By the end of the century, Bayreuth had become a gathering place for ultra-nationalists and philosophers of Aryan supremacy. Cosima had befriended Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose 1899 best-seller, “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,” tells the story of Western civilization as the forward march of the Teutonic peoples. In early 1896, just when Luranah may have been living with the Wagners, Cosima responded to an outline of Chamberlain’s book with a string of comments, one of which said, “The Negroes have surprised me. But I am entirely prepared to be convinced.” She was apparently reacting to Chamberlain’s declaration that the Aryan peoples faced a “struggle for existence” with the Chinese and the Negroes, the latter being “considerably more dangerous” than the former. The presence of Luranah may have led Cosima to question, at least for a moment, one aspect of Chamberlain’s grotesque theory.

Having recovered from her illness, Luranah inquired about singing at Bayreuth in 1897. In the Northwestern archive, I found a reply from Cosima herself, in the polished, slightly stilted English that she acquired in her schooling:

My dear Miss Aldridge, I am very sorry indeed to be obliged to tell you that our personelle is complete and that it is now too late to invite you to take a part in our performances. I am very sorry about it, but I was very glad to hear that you are well again and that you can use your fine voice. Only I would advise you to go to a good master in order to learn how to manage this fine voice, and not to destroy it before time. I should have been very glad to have seen you again, dear Miss Aldridge, I assure you, and with best wishes for you, my children and I send you kindest regards.

There is no other Wagner correspondence in the archive. Perhaps Luranah was offended at the notion that she needed further training. It’s possible, though, that Cosima had correctly identified a problem in Luranah’s technique, and that the singer had prematurely taken on heavier Wagnerian roles.

Luranah gave recitals in London until the First World War, her repertory ranging from lieder to chansons to parlor songs. Her programs were pointedly diverse, not unlike the ones that her father had created in his “Lecture in Defense of the Drama”: on one occasion, Wagner’s “Schmerzen,” from the “Wesendonck Lieder,” gave way to Amanda’s “Three African Dances.” But her health problems intensified, and after the war she became bedridden with rheumatism. Her sister looked after her devotedly. When, in 1921, W. E. B. Du Bois invited Amanda to attend the Second Pan-African Congress, she answered, “As you know, my sister is very helpless. . . . I cannot leave for more than a few minutes at a time.”

On November 20, 1932, at the age of seventy-two, Luranah Aldridge committed suicide by taking an overdose of aspirin. She was buried in a public section of Gunnersbury Cemetery, in London. On a recent visit there, I went in search of her grave, but could find no headstone. Watching the cemetery keeper dust off old records, I had the sense that no one had gone looking for her in a long time.

The first half of the Aldridge family saga is a triumph—a solitary, idiosyncratic triumph, but a triumph all the same. If the African Roscius did nothing to halt the radicalization of racism in the course of the nineteenth century, he provided glimpses of another world, stage fantasies of a future redistribution of power. His achievement loomed over subsequent generations of African-American performers; black acting companies in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Baltimore adopted the name Aldridge Players or Aldridge Dramatic Club. In 1930, Paul Robeson assumed Ira’s mantle by playing Othello in the West End; Amanda Aldridge was in attendance, and gave Robeson the gold earrings that her father had worn as Othello. Thirteen years later, as if completing Ira’s intended arc, Robeson appeared in “Othello” on Broadway.

As for Luranah, she offers a glimpse of a world that never was: one in which a black singer overcame late-nineteenth-century prejudice and established herself at the Wagner festival. What would have happened if she had sung that summer, before an audience that included George Bernard Shaw, Diaghilev, Renoir, Colette, Mahler, and Albert Schweitzer? Would there have been an outcry from right-wing factions? Would Bayreuth have earned praise from progressives? Might she have returned in bigger roles? As it was, history followed its seemingly inevitable course. In 1908, Eva Wagner, Luranah’s former friend, married Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the beady-eyed Aryan philosopher. She was present when Hitler first visited Bayreuth, in 1923. When she died, in 1942, her coffin was draped in a Nazi flag, and Hitler sent a wreath.

There is a curious epilogue to the tale of the first black Wagnerian. In 1936, Du Bois travelled to Germany on a grant from the Oberlaender Trust, his stated aim being to study industrial education, although he also wished to compare German racism with its American counterpart. A longtime Wagner fan, Du Bois included Bayreuth on his itinerary, attending performances of “Lohengrin” and the “Ring.” Here is another disorienting picture: the author of “The Souls of Black Folk” visiting the Wagner temple, amid the trappings of Hitler’s pseudo-Wagnerian regime.

Du Bois was treated courteously in Bayreuth, but he could not avoid the ideological stench of the place. Walking around, he made note of the house where Chamberlain had lived. (Eva Wagner was still there.) Pervasive anti-Semitism left him aghast. Even so, he insisted on the universality of the Wagner operas. “No human being, white or black, can afford not to know them, if he would know life,” he wrote, in a column for the Pittsburgh Courier. It was the summer of the Berlin Olympics, of Jesse Owens’s victory, and Du Bois’s readers might have been awaiting his celebration of that feat. He was, however, suspicious of the cult of sports, and preferred to focus on achievements in science and art. Gazing at mementos of Wagner in a display case, he imagines a young black artist who will one day mesmerize the world with comparable genius. He dreams of a black Wagner, a sorcerer of myth.

Du Bois’s faith in the uplifting force of so-called high culture, which mirrors the Aldridge family’s striving after Shakespeare and Wagner, now has an antiquated air. Sports heroes and pop singers are the superstars of American culture. Still, the fact remains that the chief architect of the modern civil-rights movement not only enjoyed Wagner but, in some mysterious way, took direction from him. In “The Souls of Black Folk,” Du Bois tells of a young black man whose spirit soars to the strains of “Lohengrin”: “He felt with the music the movement of power within him.” A similar rapture overcame Du Bois when he heard the opera in Bayreuth. “It is a hymn of Faith,” he wrote. “Something in this world man must trust. Not everything—but Something. One cannot live and doubt everybody and everything. Somewhere in this world, and not beyond it, there is Trust, and somehow Trust leads to Joy.” ♦

ANNALS OF MEDICINE
Slow Ideas

Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t?

by Atul Gawande

Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century. The first public demonstration of anesthesia was in 1846. The Boston surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow was approached by a local dentist named William Morton, who insisted that he had found a gas that could render patients insensible to the pain of surgery. That was a dramatic claim. In those days, even a minor tooth extraction was excruciating. Without effective pain control, surgeons learned to work with slashing speed. Attendants pinned patients down as they screamed and thrashed, until they fainted from the agony. Nothing ever tried had made much difference. Nonetheless, Bigelow agreed to let Morton demonstrate his claim.

On October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital, Morton administered his gas through an inhaler in the mouth of a young man undergoing the excision of a tumor in his jaw. The patient only muttered to himself in a semi-conscious state during the procedure. The following day, the gas left a woman, undergoing surgery to cut a large tumor from her upper arm, completely silent and motionless. When she woke, she said she had experienced nothing at all.

Four weeks later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the discovery of “insensibility produced by inhalation” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. Morton would not divulge the composition of the gas, which he called Letheon, because he had applied for a patent. But Bigelow reported that he smelled ether in it (ether was used as an ingredient in certain medical preparations), and that seems to have been enough. The idea spread like a contagion, travelling through letters, meetings, and periodicals. By mid-December, surgeons were administering ether to patients in Paris and London. By February, anesthesia had been used in almost all the capitals of Europe, and by June in most regions of the world.

There were forces of resistance, to be sure. Some people criticized anesthesia as a “needless luxury”; clergymen deplored its use to reduce pain during childbirth as a frustration of the Almighty’s designs. James Miller, a nineteenth-century Scottish surgeon who chronicled the advent of anesthesia, observed the opposition of elderly surgeons: “They closed their ears, shut their eyes, and folded their hands. . . . They had quite made up their minds that pain was a necessary evil, and must be endured.” Yet soon even the obstructors, “with a run, mounted behind—hurrahing and shouting with the best.” Within seven years, virtually every hospital in America and Britain had adopted the new discovery.

Sepsis—infection—was the other great scourge of surgery. It was the single biggest killer of surgical patients, claiming as many as half of those who underwent major operations, such as a repair of an open fracture or the amputation of a limb. Infection was so prevalent that suppuration—the discharge of pus from a surgical wound—was thought to be a necessary part of healing.

In the eighteen-sixties, the Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Lister read a paper by Louis Pasteur laying out his evidence that spoiling and fermentation were the consequence of microorganisms. Lister became convinced that the same process accounted for wound sepsis. Pasteur had observed that, besides filtration and the application of heat, exposure to certain chemicals could eliminate germs. Lister had read about the city of Carlisle’s success in using a small amount of carbolic acid to eliminate the odor of sewage, and reasoned that it was destroying germs. Maybe it could do the same in surgery.

During the next few years, he perfected ways to use carbolic acid for cleansing hands and wounds and destroying any germs that might enter the operating field. The result was strikingly lower rates of sepsis and death. You would have thought that, when he published his observations in a groundbreaking series of reports in The Lancet, in 1867, his antiseptic method would have spread as rapidly as anesthesia.

Far from it. The surgeon J. M. T. Finney recalled that, when he was a trainee at Massachusetts General Hospital two decades later, hand washing was still perfunctory. Surgeons soaked their instruments in carbolic acid, but they continued to operate in black frock coats stiffened with the blood and viscera of previous operations—the badge of a busy practice. Instead of using fresh gauze as sponges, they reused sea sponges without sterilizing them. It was a generation before Lister’s recommendations became routine and the next steps were taken toward the modern standard of asepsis—that is, entirely excluding germs from the surgical field, using heat-sterilized instruments and surgical teams clad in sterile gowns and gloves.

In our era of electronic communications, we’ve come to expect that important innovations will spread quickly. Plenty do: think of in-vitro fertilization, genomics, and communications technologies themselves. But there’s an equally long list of vital innovations that have failed to catch on. The puzzle is why.

Did the spread of anesthesia and antisepsis differ for economic reasons? Actually, the incentives for both ran in the right direction. If painless surgery attracted paying patients, so would a noticeably lower death rate. Besides, live patients were more likely to make good on their surgery bill. Maybe ideas that violate prior beliefs are harder to embrace. To nineteenth-century surgeons, germ theory seemed as illogical as, say, Darwin’s theory that human beings evolved from primates. Then again, so did the idea that you could inhale a gas and enter a pain-free state of suspended animation. Proponents of anesthesia overcame belief by encouraging surgeons to try ether on a patient and witness the results for themselves—to take a test drive. When Lister tried this strategy, however, he made little progress.

The technical complexity might have been part of the difficulty. Giving Lister’s methods “a try” required painstaking attention to detail. Surgeons had to be scrupulous about soaking their hands, their instruments, and even their catgut sutures in antiseptic solution. Lister also set up a device that continuously sprayed a mist of antiseptic over the surgical field.

But anesthesia was no easier. Obtaining ether and constructing the inhaler could be difficult. You had to make sure that the device delivered an adequate dosage, and the mechanism required constant tinkering. Yet most surgeons stuck with it—or else they switched to chloroform, which was found to be an even more powerful anesthetic, but posed its own problems. (An imprecise dosage killed people.) Faced with the complexities, they didn’t give up; instead, they formed an entire new medical specialty—anesthesiology.

So what were the key differences? First, one combatted a visible and immediate problem (pain); the other combatted an invisible problem (germs) whose effects wouldn’t be manifest until well after the operation. Second, although both made life better for patients, only one made life better for doctors. Anesthesia changed surgery from a brutal, time-pressured assault on a shrieking patient to a quiet, considered procedure. Listerism, by contrast, required the operator to work in a shower of carbolic acid. Even low dilutions burned the surgeons’ hands. You can imagine why Lister’s crusade might have been a tough sell.

This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. The global destruction wrought by a warming climate, the health damage from our over-sugared modern diet, the economic and social disaster of our trillion dollars in unpaid student debt—these things worsen imperceptibly every day. Meanwhile, the carbolic-acid remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere.

The global problem of death in childbirth is a pressing example. Every year, three hundred thousand mothers and more than six million children die around the time of birth, largely in poorer countries. Most of these deaths are due to events that occur during or shortly after delivery. A mother may hemorrhage. She or her baby may suffer an infection. Many babies can’t take their first breath without assistance, and newborns, especially those born small, have trouble regulating their body temperature after birth. Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven’t spread.

Many solutions aren’t ones you can try at home, and that’s part of the problem. Increasingly, however, women around the world are giving birth in hospitals. In India, a government program offers mothers up to fourteen hundred rupees—more than what most Indians live on for a month—when they deliver in a hospital, and now, in many areas, the majority of births are in facilities. Death rates in India have fallen, but they’re still ten times greater than in high-income countries like our own.

Not long ago, I visited a few community hospitals in north India, where just one-third of mothers received the medication recommended to prevent hemorrhage; less than ten per cent of the newborns were given adequate warming; and only four per cent of birth attendants washed their hands for vaginal examination and delivery. In an average childbirth, clinicians followed only about ten of twenty-nine basic recommended practices.

Here we are in the first part of the twenty-first century, and we’re still trying to figure out how to get ideas from the first part of the twentieth century to take root. In the hopes of spreading safer childbirth practices, several colleagues and I have teamed up with the Indian government, the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation, and Population Services International to create something called the BetterBirth Project. We’re working in Uttar Pradesh, which is among India’s poorest states. One afternoon in January, our team travelled a couple of hours from the state’s capital, Lucknow, with its bleating cars and ramshackle shops, to a rural hospital surrounded by lush farmland and thatched-hut villages. Although the sun was high and the sky was clear, the temperature was near freezing. The hospital was a one-story concrete building painted goldenrod yellow. (Our research agreement required that I keep it unnamed.) The entrance is on a dirt road lined with rows of motorbikes, the primary means of long-distance transportation. If an ambulance or an auto-rickshaw can’t be found, women in labor sit sidesaddle on the back of a bike.

The hospital delivers three thousand newborns a year, a typical volume in India but one that would put it in the top fifth of American hospitals. Yet it had little of the amenities that you’d associate with a modern hospital. I met the physician in charge, a smart and capable internist in his early thirties who had trained in the capital. He was clean-shaven and buzz-cut, with an Argyle sweater, track shoes, and a habitual half smile. He told me, apologetically, that the hospital staff had no ability to do blood tests, to give blood transfusions, or to perform emergency obstetrics procedures such as Cesarean sections. There was no electricity during the day. There was certainly no heating, even though the temperature was barely forty degrees that day, and no air-conditioning, even though summer temperatures routinely reach a hundred degrees. There were two blood-pressure cuffs for the entire facility. The nurse’s office in my neighborhood elementary school was better equipped.

The hospital was severely understaffed, too. The doctor said that half of the staff positions were vacant. To help with child deliveries for a local population of a quarter of a million people, the hospital had two nurses and one obstetrician, who happened to be his wife. The nurses, who had six months of childbirth training, did most of the deliveries, swapping shifts year-round. The obstetrician covered the outpatient clinic, and helped with complicated births whenever she was required, day or night. During holidays or sickness, the two nurses covered for each other, but, if no one was available, laboring women were either sent to another hospital, miles away, or an untrained assistant might be forced to step in.

It may be surprising that mothers are better off delivering in such places than at home in a village, but studies show a consistently higher survival rate when they do. The staff members I met in India had impressive experience. Even the youngest nurses had done more than a thousand child deliveries. They’ve seen and learned to deal with countless problems—a torn placenta, an umbilical cord wrapped around a baby’s neck, a stuck shoulder. Seeing the daily heroism required to keep such places going, you feel foolish and ill-mannered asking how they could do things better.

But then we hung out in the wards for a while. In the delivery room, a boy had just been born. He and his mother were lying on a cot, bundled under woollen blankets, resting. The room was coffin-cold; I was having trouble feeling my toes. I tried to imagine what that baby must have felt like. Newborns have a high body-surface area and lose heat rapidly. Even in warm weather, hypothermia is common, and it makes newborns weak and less responsive, less able to breast-feed adequately and more prone to infection. I noticed that the boy was swaddled separately from his mother. Voluminous evidence shows that it is far better to place the child on the mother’s chest or belly, skin to skin, so that the mother’s body can regulate the baby’s until it is ready to take over. Among small or premature babies, kangaroo care (as it is known) cuts mortality rates by a third.

So why hadn’t the nurse swaddled the two together? She was a skilled and self-assured woman in her mid-thirties with twinkly eyes, a brown knit hat, and a wool sweater over her shalwar kameez. Resources clearly weren’t the issue—kangaroo care costs nothing. Had she heard of it? Oh, yes, she said. She’d taken a skilled-birth-attendant class that taught it. Had she forgotten about it? No. She had actually offered to put the baby skin to skin with the mother, and showed me where she’d noted this in the record.

“The mother didn’t want it,” she explained. “She said she was too cold.”

The nurse seemed to think it was strange that I was making such an issue of this. The baby was fine, wasn’t he? And he was. He was sleeping sweetly, a tightly wrapped peanut with a scrunched brown face and his mouth in a lowercase “o.”

But had his temperature been taken? It had not. The nurse said that she had been planning to do so. Our visit had disrupted her routine. Suppose she had, though, and his temperature was low. Would she have done anything differently? Would she have made the mom unswaddle the child and put him to her chest?

Everything about the life the nurse leads—the hours she puts in, the circumstances she endures, the satisfaction she takes in her abilities—shows that she cares. But hypothermia, like the germs that Lister wanted surgeons to battle, is invisible to her. We picture a blue child, suffering right before our eyes. That is not what hypothermia looks like. It is a child who is just a few degrees too cold, too sluggish, too slow to feed. It will be some time before the baby begins to lose weight, stops making urine, develops pneumonia or a bloodstream infection. Long before that happens—usually the morning after the delivery, perhaps the same night—the mother will have hobbled to an auto-rickshaw, propped herself beside her husband, held her new baby tight, and ridden the rutted roads home.

From the nurse’s point of view, she’d helped bring another life into the world. If four per cent of the newborns later died at home, what could that possibly have to do with how she wrapped the mother and child? Or whether she washed her hands before putting on gloves? Or whether the blade with which she cut the umbilical cord was sterilized?

We’re infatuated with the prospect of technological solutions to these problems—baby warmers, say. You can still find high-tech incubators in rural hospitals that sit mothballed because a replacement part wasn’t available, or because there was no electricity for them. In recent years, though, engineers have produced designs specifically for the developing world. Dr. Steven Ringer, a neonatologist and BetterBirth leader, was an adviser for a team that made a cheap, ingenious, award-winning incubator from old car parts that are commonly available and easily replaced in low-income environments. Yet it hasn’t taken off, either. “It’s in more museums than delivery rooms,” he laments.

As with most difficulties in global health care, lack of adequate technology is not the biggest problem. We already have a great warming technology: a mother’s skin. But even in high-income countries we do not consistently use it. In the United States, according to Ringer, more than half of newborns needing intensive care arrive hypothermic. Preventing hypothermia is a perfect example of an unsexy task: it demands painstaking effort without immediate reward. Getting hospitals and birth attendants to carry out even a few of the tasks required for safer childbirth would save hundreds of thousands of lives. But how do we do that?

The most common approach to changing behavior is to say to people, “Please do X.” Please warm the newborn. Please wash your hands. Please follow through on the twenty-seven other childbirth practices that you’re not doing. This is what we say in the classroom, in instructional videos, and in public-service campaigns, and it works, but only up to a point.

Then, there’s the law-and-order approach: “You must do X.” We establish standards and regulations, and threaten to punish failures with fines, suspensions, the revocation of licenses. Punishment can work. Behavioral economists have even quantified how averse people are to penalties. In experimental games, they will often quit playing rather than risk facing negative consequences. And that is the problem with threatening to discipline birth attendants who are taking difficult-to-fill jobs under intensely trying conditions. They’ll quit.

The kinder version of “You must do X” is to offer incentives rather than penalties. Maybe we could pay birth attendants a bonus for every healthy child who makes it past a week of life. But then you think about how hard it would be to make a scheme like that work, especially in poor settings. You’d need a sophisticated tracking procedure, to make sure that people aren’t gaming the system, and complex statistical calculations, to take prior risks into account. There’s also the impossible question of how you split the reward among all the people involved. How much should the community health worker who provided the prenatal care get? The birth attendant who handled the first twelve hours of labor? The one who came on duty and handled the delivery? The doctor who was called in when things got complicated? The pharmacist who stocked the antibiotic that the child required?

Besides, neither penalties nor incentives achieve what we’re really after: a system and a culture where X is what people do, day in and day out, even when no one is watching. “You must” rewards mere compliance. Getting to “X is what we do” means establishing X as the norm. And that’s what we want: for skin-to-skin warming, hand washing, and all the other lifesaving practices of childbirth to be, quite simply, the norm.

To create new norms, you have to understand people’s existing norms and barriers to change. You have to understand what’s getting in their way. So what about just working with health-care workers, one by one, to do just that? With the BetterBirth Project, we wondered, in particular, what would happen if we hired a cadre of childbirth-improvement workers to visit birth attendants and hospital leaders, show them why and how to follow a checklist of essential practices, understand their difficulties and objections, and help them practice doing things differently. In essence, we’d give them mentors.

The experiment is just getting under way. The project has recruited only the first few of a hundred or so workers whom we are sending out to hospitals across six regions of Uttar Pradesh in a trial that will involve almost two hundred thousand births over two years. There’s no certainty that our approach will succeed. But it seemed worth trying.

Reactions that I’ve heard both abroad and at home have been interestingly divided. The most common objection is that, even if it works, this kind of one-on-one, on-site mentoring “isn’t scalable.” But that’s one thing it surely is. If the intervention saves as many mothers and newborns as we’re hoping—about a thousand lives in the course of a year at the target hospitals—then all that need be done is to hire and develop similar cadres of childbirth-improvement workers for other places around the country and potentially the world. To many people, that doesn’t sound like much of a solution. It would require broad mobilization, substantial expense, and perhaps even the development of a new profession. But, to combat the many antisepsis-like problems in the world, that’s exactly what has worked. Think about the creation of anesthesiology: it meant doubling the number of doctors in every operation, and we went ahead and did so. To reduce illiteracy, countries, starting with our own, built schools, trained professional teachers, and made education free and compulsory for all children. To improve farming, governments have sent hundreds of thousands of agriculture extension agents to visit farmers across America and every corner of the world and teach them up-to-date methods for increasing their crop yields. Such programs have been extraordinarily effective. They have cut the global illiteracy rate from one in three adults in 1970 to one in six today, and helped give us a Green Revolution that saved more than a billion people from starvation.

In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability.

But technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.

This is something that salespeople understand well. I once asked a pharmaceutical rep how he persuaded doctors—who are notoriously stubborn—to adopt a new medicine. Evidence is not remotely enough, he said, however strong a case you may have. You must also apply “the rule of seven touches.” Personally “touch” the doctors seven times, and they will come to know you; if they know you, they might trust you; and, if they trust you, they will change. That’s why he stocked doctors’ closets with free drug samples in person. Then he could poke his head around the corner and ask, “So how did your daughter Debbie’s soccer game go?” Eventually, this can become “Have you seen this study on our new drug? How about giving it a try?” As the rep had recognized, human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.

In 1968, The Lancet published the results of a modest trial of what is now regarded as among the most important medical advances of the twentieth century. It wasn’t a new drug or vaccine or operation. It was basically a solution of sugar, salt, and water that you could make in your kitchen. The researchers gave the solution to victims of a cholera outbreak in Dhaka, the capital of what is now Bangladesh, and the results were striking.

Cholera is a violent and deadly diarrheal illness, caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholera, which the victim usually ingests from contaminated water. The bacteria secrete a toxin that triggers a rapid outpouring of fluid into the intestine. The body, which is sixty per cent water, becomes like a sponge being wrung out. The fluid pouring out is a cloudy white, likened to the runoff of washed rice. It produces projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea. Children can lose a third of their body’s water in less than twenty-four hours, a fatal volume. Drinking water to replace the fluid loss is ineffective, because the intestine won’t absorb it. As a result, mortality commonly reached seventy per cent or higher. During the nineteenth century, cholera pandemics killed millions across Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America. The disease was dubbed the Blue Death because of the cyanotic blue-gray color of the skin from extreme dehydration.

In 1906, a partially effective treatment was found: intravenous fluid solutions reduced mortality to thirty per cent. Prevention was the most effective approach. Modern sewage and water treatment eliminated the disease in affluent countries. Globally, though, millions of children continued to die from diarrheal illness each year. Even if victims made it to a medical facility, the needles, plastic tubing, and litres of intravenous fluid required for treatment were expensive, in short supply, and dependent on medical workers who were themselves in short supply, especially in outbreaks that often produced thousands of victims.

Then, in the nineteen-sixties, scientists discovered that sugar helps the gut absorb fluid. Two American researchers, David Nalin and Richard Cash, were in Dhaka during a cholera outbreak. They decided to test the scientific findings, giving victims an oral rehydration solution containing sugar as well as salt. Many people doubted that victims could drink enough of it to restore their fluid losses, typically ten to twenty litres a day. So the researchers confined the Dhaka trial to twenty-nine patients. The subjects proved to have no trouble drinking enough to reduce or even eliminate the need for intravenous fluids, and none of them died.

Three years later, in 1971, an Indian physician named Dilip Mahalanabis was directing medical assistance at a West Bengal camp of three hundred and fifty thousand refugees from Bangladesh’s war of independence when cholera struck. Intravenous-fluid supplies ran out. Mahalanabis instructed his team to try the Dhaka solution. Just 3.6 per cent died, an unprecedented reduction from the usual thirty per cent. The solution was actually better than intravenous fluids. If cholera victims were alert, able to drink, and supplied with enough of it, they could almost always save their own lives.

One might have expected people to clamor for the recipe after these results were publicized. Oral rehydration solution seems like ether: a miraculous fix for a vivid, immediate, and terrifying problem. But it wasn’t like ether at all.

To understand why, you have to imagine having a child throwing up and pouring out diarrhea like you’ve never seen before. Making her drink seems only to provoke more vomiting. Chasing the emesis and the diarrhea seems both torturous and futile. Many people’s natural inclination is to not feed the child anything.

Furthermore, why believe that this particular mixture of sugar and salt would be any different from water or anything else you might have tried? And it is particular. Throw the salt concentration off by a couple of teaspoons and the electrolyte imbalance could be dangerous. The child must also keep drinking the stuff even after she feels better, for as long as the diarrhea lasts, which is up to five days. Nurses routinely got these steps wrong. Why would villagers do any better?

A decade after the landmark findings, the idea remained stalled. Nothing much had changed. Diarrheal disease remained the world’s biggest killer of children under the age of five.

In 1980, however, a Bangladeshi nonprofit organization called BRAC decided to try to get oral rehydration therapy adopted nationwide. The campaign required reaching a mostly illiterate population. The most recent public-health campaign—to teach family planning—had been deeply unpopular. The messages the campaign needed to spread were complicated.

Nonetheless, the campaign proved remarkably successful. A gem of a book published in Bangladesh, “A Simple Solution,” tells the story. The organization didn’t launch a mass-media campaign—only twenty per cent of the population had a radio, after all. It attacked the problem in a way that is routinely dismissed as impractical and inefficient: by going door to door, person by person, and just talking.

It started with a pilot project that set out to reach some sixty thousand women in six hundred villages. The logistics were daunting. Who, for instance, would do the teaching? How were those workers going to travel? How was their security to be assured? The BRAC leaders planned the best they could and then made adjustments on the fly.

They recruited teams of fourteen young women, a cook, and a male supervisor, figuring that the supervisor would protect them from others as they travelled, and the women’s numbers would protect them from the supervisor. They travelled on foot, pitched camp near each village, fanned out door to door, and stayed until they had talked to women in every hut. They worked long days, six days a week. Each night after dinner, they held a meeting to discuss what went well and what didn’t and to share ideas on how to do better. Leaders periodically debriefed them, as well.

The workers were only semi-literate, but they helped distill their sales script into seven easy-to-remember messages: for instance, severe diarrhea leads to death from dehydration; the signs of dehydration include dry tongue, sunken eyes, thirst, severe weakness, and reduced urination; the way to treat dehydration is to replace salt and water lost from the body, starting with the very first loose stool; a rehydration solution provides the most effective way to do this. BRAC’s scientists had to figure out how the workers could teach the recipe for the solution. Villagers had no precise measuring implements—spoons were locally made in nonstandard sizes. The leaders considered issuing special measuring spoons with the recipe on the handle. But these would be costly; most people couldn’t read the recipe; and how were the spoons to be replaced when lost? Eventually, the team hit upon using finger measures: a fistful of raw sugar plus a three-finger pinch of salt mixed in half a “seer” of water—a pint measure commonly used by villagers when buying milk and oil. Tests showed that mothers could make this with sufficient accuracy.

Initially, the workers taught up to twenty mothers per day. But monitors visiting the villages a few weeks later found that the quality of teaching suffered on this larger scale, so the workers were restricted to ten households a day. Then a new salary system was devised to pay each worker according to how many of the messages the mothers retained when the monitor followed up. The quality of teaching improved substantially. The field workers soon realized that having the mothers make the solution themselves was more effective than just showing them. The workers began looking for diarrhea cases when they arrived in a village, and treating them to show how effective and safe the remedy was. The scientists also investigated various questions that came up, such as whether clean water was required. (They found that, although boiled water was preferable, contaminated water was better than nothing.)

Early signs were promising. Mothers seemed to retain the key messages. Analysis of their sugar solutions showed that three-quarters made them properly, and just four in a thousand had potentially unsafe salt levels. So BRAC and the Bangladeshi government took the program nationwide. They hired, trained, and deployed thousands of workers region by region. The effort was, inevitably, imperfect. But, by going door to door through more than seventy-five thousand villages, they showed twelve million families how to save their children.

The program was stunningly successful. Use of oral rehydration therapy skyrocketed. The knowledge became self-propagating. The program had changed the norms.

Coaxing villagers to make the solution with their own hands and explain the messages in their own words, while a trainer observed and guided them, achieved far more than any public-service ad or instructional video could have done. Over time, the changes could be sustained with television and radio, and the growth of demand led to the development of a robust market for manufactured oral rehydration salt packets. Three decades later, national surveys have found that almost ninety per cent of children with severe diarrhea were given the solution. Child deaths from diarrhea plummeted more than eighty per cent between 1980 and 2005.

As other countries adopted Bangladesh’s approach, global diarrheal deaths dropped from five million a year to two million, despite a fifty-per-cent increase in the world’s population during the past three decades. Nonetheless, only a third of children in the developing world receive oral rehydration therapy. Many countries tried to implement at arm’s length, going “low touch,” without sandals on the ground. As a recent study by the Gates Foundation and the University of Washington has documented, those countries have failed almost entirely. People talking to people is still how the world’s standards change.

Surgeons finally did upgrade their antiseptic standards at the end of the nineteenth century. But, as is often the case with new ideas, the effort required deeper changes than anyone had anticipated. In their blood-slick, viscera-encrusted black coats, surgeons had seen themselves as warriors doing hemorrhagic battle with little more than their bare hands. A few pioneering Germans, however, seized on the idea of the surgeon as scientist. They traded in their black coats for pristine laboratory whites, refashioned their operating rooms to achieve the exacting sterility of a bacteriological lab, and embraced anatomic precision over speed.

The key message to teach surgeons, it turned out, was not how to stop germs but how to think like a laboratory scientist. Young physicians from America and elsewhere who went to Germany to study with its surgical luminaries became fervent converts to their thinking and their standards. They returned as apostles not only for the use of antiseptic practice (to kill germs) but also for the much more exacting demands of aseptic practice (to prevent germs), such as wearing sterile gloves, gowns, hats, and masks. Proselytizing through their own students and colleagues, they finally spread the ideas worldwide.

In childbirth, we have only begun to accept that the critical practices aren’t going to spread themselves. Simple “awareness” isn’t going to solve anything. We need our sales force and our seven easy-to-remember messages. And in many places around the world the concerted, person-by-person effort of changing norms is under way.

I recently asked BetterBirth workers in India whether they’d yet seen a birth attendant change what she does. Yes, they said, but they’ve found that it takes a while. They begin by providing a day of classroom training for birth attendants and hospital leaders in the checklist of practices to be followed. Then they visit them on site to observe as they try to apply the lessons.

Sister Seema Yadav, a twenty-four-year-old, round-faced nurse three years out of school, was one of the trainers. (Nurses are called “sisters” in India, a carryover from the British usage.) Her first assignment was to follow a thirty-year-old nurse with vastly more experience than she had. Watching the nurse take a woman through labor and delivery, she saw how little of the training had been absorbed. The room had not been disinfected; blood from a previous birth remained in a bucket. When the woman came in—moaning, contractions speeding up—the nurse didn’t check her vital signs. She didn’t wash her hands. She prepared no emergency supplies. After delivery, she checked the newborn’s temperature with her hand, not a thermometer. Instead of warming the baby against the mother’s skin, she handed the newborn to the relatives.

When Sister Seema pointed out the discrepancy between the teaching and the practice, the nurse was put out. She gave many reasons that steps were missed—there was no time, they were swamped with deliveries, there was seldom a thermometer at hand, the cleaners never did their job. Sister Seema—a cheerful, bubbly, fast talker—took her to the cleaner on duty and together they explained why cleaning the rooms between deliveries was so important. They went to the medical officer in charge and asked for a thermometer to be supplied. At her second and third visits, disinfection seemed more consistent. A thermometer had been found in a storage closet. But the nurse still hadn’t changed much of her own routine.

By the fourth or fifth visit, their conversations had shifted. They shared cups of chai and began talking about why you must wash hands even if you wear gloves (because of holes in the gloves and the tendency to touch equipment without them on), and why checking blood pressure matters (because hypertension is a sign of eclampsia, which, when untreated, is a common cause of death among pregnant women). They learned a bit about each other, too. Both turned out to have one child—Sister Seema a four-year-old boy, the nurse an eight-year-old girl. The nurse lived in the capital, a two-hour bus ride away. She was divorced, living with her mother, and struggled with the commute. She’d been frustrated not to find a hospital posting in the city. She worked for days at a stretch, sleeping on a cot when she got a break. Sister Seema commiserated, and shared her own hopes for her family and her future. With time, it became clearer to the nurse that Sister Seema was there only to help and to learn from the experience herself. They even exchanged mobile-phone numbers and spoke between visits. When Sister Seema didn’t have the answer to a question, she made sure she got one.

Soon, she said, the nurse began to change. After several visits, she was taking temperatures and blood pressures properly, washing her hands, giving the necessary medications—almost everything. Sister Seema saw it with her own eyes.

She’d had to move on to another pilot site after that, however. And although the project is tracking the outcomes of mothers and newborns, it will be a while before we have enough numbers to know if a difference has been made. So I got the nurse’s phone number and, with a translator to help with the Hindi, I gave her a call.

It had been four months since Sister Seema’s visit ended. I asked her whether she’d made any changes. Lots, she said.

“What was the most difficult one?” I asked.

“Washing hands,” she said. “I have to do it so many times!”

“What was the easiest?”

“Taking the vital signs properly.” Before, she said, “we did it haphazardly.” Afterward, “everything became much more systematic.”

She said that she had eventually begun to see the effects. Bleeding after delivery was reduced. She recognized problems earlier. She rescued a baby who wasn’t breathing. She diagnosed eclampsia in a mother and treated it. You could hear her pride as she told her stories.

Many of the changes took practice for her, she said. She had to learn, for instance, how to have all the critical supplies—blood-pressure cuff, thermometer, soap, clean gloves, baby respiratory mask, medications—lined up and ready for when she needed them; how to fit the use of them into her routine; how to convince mothers and their relatives that the best thing for a child was to be bundled against the mother’s skin. But, step by step, Sister Seema had helped her to do it. “She showed me how to get things done practically,” the nurse said.

“Why did you listen to her?” I asked. “She had only a fraction of your experience.”

In the beginning, she didn’t, the nurse admitted. “The first day she came, I felt the workload on my head was increasing.” From the second time, however, the nurse began feeling better about the visits. She even began looking forward to them.

“Why?” I asked.

All the nurse could think to say was “She was nice.”

“She was nice?”

“She smiled a lot.”

“That was it?”

“It wasn’t like talking to someone who was trying to find mistakes,” she said. “It was like talking to a friend.”

That, I think, was the answer. Since then, the nurse had developed her own way of explaining why newborns needed to be warmed skin to skin. She said that she now tells families, “Inside the uterus, the baby is very warm. So when the baby comes out it should be kept very warm. The mother’s skin does this.”

I hadn’t been sure if she was just telling me what I wanted to hear. But when I heard her explain how she’d put her own words to what she’d learned, I knew that the ideas had spread. “Do the families listen?” I asked.

“Sometimes they don’t,” she said. “Usually, they do.” ♦

NOTES OF A GASTRONOME
Cooking with Daniel

Three French classics.

by Bill Buford

Two years ago, during the summer of 2011, Daniel Boulud, the New York-based French chef, told me he had been thinking about a project that we might do together. We were both in France at the time. I was living in Lyons—I had moved there in order to learn French cooking—and Boulud was visiting his family in Saint-Pierre-de-Chandieu, a nearby village on a wooded ridge in the open countryside.

It is where Boulud grew up, on a working farm. For Boulud, the farm childhood was idyllic and not so idyllic. He was allergic to hay. (“How can you be allergic to hay and live on a farm?” his mother, Marie, asked me.) He seemed to be allergic to just about everything else as well. He remembers Easter vacation from school as the time when he couldn’t play soccer with his friends, because he had to weed the garlic field. Shortly before his fourteenth birthday, when he was doing badly in school and had become a worry to his parents, a neighbor intervened, a flamboyant figure known as the Countess. She arrived bearing a no-nonsense, let’s-settle-this-thing-now resolve and asked the boy what he wanted to do in his life. “I want to be a chef,” he said. Then he reflected. “Or maybe a jockey.”

In fact, he couldn’t have known much about what a chef actually did. He had never been inside a restaurant. He had never eaten store-bought food. On the farm, everything that was put out on the long wooden Boulud kitchen table—two benches running alongside, picnic style—had been produced by his family: milk, wine, cheese, vinegar, vegetables, the salads in the summer, the jars of pickled harvests or conserved fruit the rest of the year, the chicken and the duck and the fatty bacon served cold with breakfast. (Salt and olive oil were got by barter from relatives in the South.) But the Countess—she called herself Countess de Volpi—knew what a chef did. The best restaurants in and around Lyons were then regarded as among the best in France. She had eaten at all of them. Several had three Michelin stars and a reputation for making the best food on the planet. The Countess was rich, single, brazenly modern. (In the Boulud family’s telling, she was “decadent bourgeoise.” They were paysan.) She had long platinum hair. She owned an American car, a Mustang convertible. Her lover was a wealthy surgeon. She was used to getting her way. She phoned the restaurants—Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, La Mère Blanc, La Pyramide, La Mère Brazier—and asked them to take on an apprentice. The places were filled. She started in on the two-stars. She scored. Two months after his fourteenth birthday, Daniel Boulud entered a restaurant for the first time, and took, in effect, his first step in the direction of New York.

The restaurant was called Nandron. It was off the N7, on a quai facing the Rhône river. Before the expressway, the two-lane N7 was the main route between Paris and the South of France, and many of the region’s dedicatedly gastronomic establishments were on it. Nandron was busy. It had its N7 traffic, and its locals, politicians, bankers, the mayor, businessmen—an affluent clientele, in Daniel’s recollection. He spied them from the kitchen. He wasn’t allowed into the dining room, except on Fridays, when he received his week’s earnings from Madame Nandron, who—a widow when Daniel first showed up, on a June morning in 1969—was always parked near the cash drawer. Her husband, Joannès, had been an advocate of the ancient, highly elaborate French kitchen, la grande cuisine. He had also been an early advocate of training young cooks as apprentices—one of the first in Lyons, according to Boulud. He died in the early sixties, and Gérard, the son, had taken over, but remained committed to his father’s dishes, even when he must have known that French cooking was changing. These were the last days of the old ways. “Nouvelle cuisine”—the term that the magazine Gault & Millau later made famous, in its issue of October, 1973—was still a rumor in Paris, but it was a rumor that, according to Boulud, everyone in the kitchen was hearing.

Nandron, Jr., was also chauvinistically lyonnais—the city was widely accepted as “the gastronomic capital of the world”—and in everything he taught the new apprentice there was usually one of two lessons, either the old-school way of doing things or the local, lyonnais way. In the weekly chartreuse, a complicated dish that was a house specialty, there were two lessons in one: it was both old school and local.

It was made on Mondays. That was when the birds arrived. (Lyons could also be called “the bird-eaters capital of the world.”) Gérard shot them over the weekend. He glided up to the restaurant’s service entrance, a ritual of autumn, in a Citroën DS—de Gaulle’s car, a proclamation of Frenchness and entitlement—and popped open the trunk, from which Daniel, already waiting, gathered up the bounty, removed it to the basement, and began plucking. Daniel was the restaurant’s No. 1 plucker: on a farm, everyone plucks.

I. CHARTREUSE

The project that Boulud had in mind was this: side by side, we would make a dozen or so dishes. He would get everything ready; I would write it up afterward. Me + him + ingredients = food + story. Most of the dishes would be Old Worldy. They would also be the food that had been most important in his life: dishes that, once he learned how to make them, had, in an elusively poetic way, then made him.

Many were so lyonnais in spirit that Boulud considered preparing them in their city of origin. Or, at least, he pretended to. Boulud doesn’t have a three-star cooking space in Lyons. He also wouldn’t have a predatory brigade of take-no-prisoners cooks at his beck and call. And then there was the question of a prep kitchen: in Lyons, nothing; in Manhattan, beneath the restaurant Daniel, on East Sixty-fifth Street, a purpose-built cooking factory, marginally larger than the sports arenas found in most mid-sized towns. For these and other reasons, it was Lyons that came to New York. And so, too, did I. And, because the restaurant doesn’t do a lunch service, that killer Michelin-three-star cooking space became, in effect, my office. Like my fellow-commuters on the subway, I started at around eight each morning.

There were obvious challenges in making a chartreuse. For me, there were additional challenges, in knowing how to think about it. The difficulty was the name. La Chartreuse is a mountain range, about ninety minutes east of Lyons by car. L’Ordre des Chartreux is a monastery built in those mountains. It is known for the extreme lifelong vows it imposes (like not talking, ever). Then, there was Chartreuse the drink, an herbal distillation originally made by the monastery from an anonymous recipe discovered in 1605. And, finally, there is the adjective “chartreuse,” a neon green, the color of the drink. These words—a mountain, a monastery, a drink, a color—are related to each other in obvious ways. Chartreuse the dish didn’t seem to be related to any of them. For Boulud, a chartreuse was this: a game-bird confection that looks like a joke birthday cake.

It took three days.

On Day One, we made the farce—the filling, which was chopped-up cabbage sautéed in pork belly, duck fat, and foie gras, plus whatever leg meat from game birds happened to be hanging around. (There happened to be a lot.) Who could come up with a fattier cabbage? It was the meatiest vegetable I remember eating. It was insanely satisfying. It compounded my confusion.

Why “chartreuse”? No one understood the problem. I searched the digital holdings of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, looking for edible examples of the word. I found several, all in the nineteenth century. Nothing explained how they came to be called what they were called. You don’t name a dish after a bunch of monks for no reason, do you?

On Day Two, the birds were prepared. Most chartreuse recipes call for one bird, a fat one, like a pigeon or a partridge, secreted inside the casing, a vegetable mold, which is then turned out onto a plate. Ours, being an extravagant tribute to Nandron’s Citroën DS trunk, called not for a single fat fowl but for a cacophonous flock—fat and skinny, big and small, quails, woodcocks, doves, pheasants, and both a pigeon and a partridge. Bernard Vrod, a maître d’ at the restaurant, is a hunter. We used only the breasts, roasted pink. They would be stacked neatly inside the mold like Lincoln Logs and then held in place by the farce, shovelled in and pressed tight.

Finally, we addressed the casing. This was Day Three. The casing was made from root vegetables—white turnips, yellow and orange carrots, in our experiment—sliced thin on a mandoline, steamed until pliable, and trimmed into shape with a knife. The casing was the responsibility of Chad Brauze, an American interloper in an overwhelmingly French kitchen. Chad was beanpole tall, had black horn-rimmed glasses and a baseball-diamond aw-shucks manner. Boulud had asked him to help out with the logistics on the more historically knotty dishes. It was Chad, for instance, who determined the dimensions of each root-vegetable slice in the casing. In his spare time, Chad is a student of mathematics at Columbia University. He came up with a precise triangulation formula intended to eliminate overhangs and overlaps, each piece falling into place as in a children’s puzzle. In practice, the pieces shrank; the formula was useless; and much snipping was needed to get the thing to fit into its snug, pastry-cake illusion. At one point, five of us were bumping shoulders, squeezing our triangles into an increasingly small-seeming mold, lifting them out again to re-trim, our fingers becoming more balloonlike the closer we got to finishing.

Then we started in on a second mold. It was smaller.

They both went into the oven. We waited.

On a bookshelf in Daniel’s office, I came upon a “Chartreuse” entry in a nineteenth-century food encyclopedia, “Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine,” by Alexandre Dumas, the novelist (“The Count of Monte Cristo,” “The Three Musketeers”). For a man whose métier was the imagination, Dumas is remarkably unimaginative in his treatment of the dish. He quotes Carême, not much else, and at great length. The suggestion is that Carême is the guy. Marie-Antonin Carême was a great impresario of the French kitchen, probably the greatest, and the author of the five-volume “L’Art de la Cuisine Française au XIXe Siècle,” which began appearing in 1833. (That is, he was mainly the author. He subverted the project by dying after Volume III. The last two volumes were completed posthumously and published by Armand Plumerey, Carême’s collaborator.) Carême is often credited with inventing every dish eaten in France. It turns out that, no, he didn’t invent every dish. It also seems unlikely that he made up an edible chartreuse all on his own.

I investigated, to make sure, and, yes, there were earlier versions, a few, including one published long before Carême was born. I also came upon a preparation that was different from the others. The recipe is in “Le Cuisinier Imperial,” by Alexandre Viard, published in 1806. Carême was flashy. Viard was earnest. Carême was sophisticated, ironic, clever, elegant, precocious. Viard was plainspoken and dutiful. Viard gave people the goods, and his book was absurdly popular, a new version appearing regularly until 1875 (thirty-two editions, by one count). Until I read Viard, I would have said that every chartreuse, from 1755 and for the next hundred and fifty years or so, had the same basic design: a casing and a surprise inside. Viard has the casing but no goody. Instead of meat, he says matter-of-factly (no explanation necessary), you put vegetables. He likes lettuce leaves, pressed to get the liquid out: nothing else.

In the early nineteenth century, “chartreuse” the color, it turns out, was not a word. This was my clue. The monks of Chartreux were not famous for their green liqueur, because few people knew it. Until around the eighteen-forties, I learned, the drink wasn’t distributed any farther than a donkey could carry it. The monks were famous mainly for those extreme vows, including one never to eat meat. Plenty of people didn’t eat meat, of course—the religious calendar and all that—but few ate meat never. (The food historian Jim Chevallier points out that the word “vegetarian” didn’t exist yet.) In early-nineteenth-century France, a vegetarian was considered an exotic, an eccentric, a bit nutty.

A chartreuse that is made with irony pretends to be made with vegetables. (Psst, look inside—you’ll find what we know you secretly crave, a piece of forbidden animal tissue.) The dish is, in fact, named after a bunch of monks, mountain freaks who never knew the fatty happiness of a steak frites and a glass of red.

When the two molds had finished cooking, they were turned out, and one was mounted on the other. Boulud arranged woodcock heads on top and stepped back. The effect was unlike anything I had witnessed in a kitchen. There was an instantaneous feeling of wonder. Wow! We were responsible for that? It was almost incomprehensible in its unnaturally natural beauty.

Now I find myself wondering if it is in this unnatural beauty that we discover Carême: the lines and the geometric shapes, as if created by a machine, but smelling of the earth. He didn’t invent the dish, but he may have made it his own. Carême is known for giant, preposterous foods that gobbled up space in three dimensions; he found inspiration in architectural plans that he studied in the royal library in Paris. Nobody makes that stuff anymore. The enduring achievement is in two dimensions: unnaturally straight lines made out of natural ingredients. In Dumas’s entry, Carême recommends that the dish be prepared in late spring or summer, “the happy and benevolent season” (saison riante et propice), when vegetables are at their most tender. The vegetables in question are mostly roots, stored and normally eaten in winter. This is a pastry chef’s instruction. It is not a hunter’s. Nandron shot his birds in the autumn, when they are migrating. In late spring or early summer, they are mating or about to lay their eggs. But in late spring or early summer a vegetable, even a lowly root, is at its most colorful. Color gives you the crisp line.

Boulud cut into the chartreuse. He was thrilled, he said. He corrected himself. It was not that he was thrilled; he was not unthrilled. (Boulud doesn’t really do “happy.”) He had a bite. “C’est pas mal,” he said. The game birds, the fat, the forest scents, the autumnal flavors, late harvests and mushrooms and dirt. “C’est du vrai medieval.” He had another bite. Despite an effort at restraint, he was growing excited. Maybe he was hungry, because after a third bite he said quietly, as though to himself, “This is actually country grand.” He was also jumping slightly. I had never seen this jumping thing before. He seemed about to bounce through the kitchen, elflike, until finally he declared, “C’est le vrai goût de la France.”

I had a bite, trying to locate the flavors that Boulud was describing. I wanted to commit them to memory, this goût, this taste, this France.

II. COULIBIAC

I had never heard of coulibiac—basically, a fish pie—and didn’t have a clue how to make it. I discovered that no one else in Boulud’s kitchen knew how to make it, either. This was largely because, for the past three or four decades, it wasn’t often being made by anyone anywhere. In fact, it is entirely possible that if the dish exists today—and it exists only to the extent that it might be waiting to be rediscovered—it is because of one man: Craig Claiborne.

Claiborne loved his coulibiac. He was the reigning dining critic for the Times. For twenty-nine years, he told New Yorkers what and where to eat. His sway was enormous. Today, it seems imperial. He was also an unapologetic Francophile, even if he may have been a little out of step with the times. It is possible that because of Claiborne, and his enthusiasm for the old-school Gaullist kitchen, New Yorkers tended to patronize one kind of French restaurant, the Old World kind, with menus of Old World “classics.” It is also possible—and this, too, might be because of Claiborne—that these were the only French restaurants that New Yorkers knew. Claiborne never thought of himself as a guardian of the old French menu. He would have had no idea that it needed protecting. He just regarded it as what French food should be. He was supported in this by a number of French-born, Manhattan-based, Old World chefs, the Claiborne “team.” This was the team that Boulud joined on October 12, 1982, the day he arrived in New York.

Boulud was, by and large, another Old World chef, but, at twenty-seven, he was decades younger than his New York colleagues and, maybe, more worldly as well. Unlike the colleagues, who had come years earlier by boat, Boulud came by airplane. Unlike the colleagues, who plied a craft that they had acquired from some old-country grand chef now long gone, Boulud had already worked for half a dozen cutting-edge masters, including several so-called “founders” of nouvelle cuisine; and they were in France. It was a long time since a member of the team had actually worked in France. But they knew their New York, and prepared Boulud for a New York ritual: the “invitation,” extended to every new French chef, to appear at Claiborne’s house and cook for him.

This was in East Hampton. Boulud arrived on a Friday evening. He bought his ingredients in the morning, and then—bam!—he was off! “Right away, Craig was putting questions to me, fast, one after another,” Boulud said. Claiborne wanted him to explain everything: history, sources, background, each step. Boulud, standing over a stove, pulling trays out of an oven, stacking dirties in the sink, breathlessly replied as well as he could, while plating the food, as Claiborne, also standing (a manual typewriter on a high table, Hemingway style), banged out the answers. “It was exhilarating,” Boulud said.

It was also exhilarating in the surprising way that New York was now exhilarating, not necessarily for the familiar New York reasons—its edgy, never-sleeping modernity—but because, for a young chef from France, it was not modern: its restaurants were backward. They had fallen off the calendar. In Boulud’s eyes, they all had wonderful time-warp menus that had been created during the great restaurant flourishing before the Second World War (and old-fashioned then), and rarely touched since. It is not how New York likes to think of itself, but in 1982 its good restaurants were museums. It was in New York, not Paris, that Boulud began seeing dishes that, until then, he had only heard of. Coulibiac was one: popular in the eighteen-seventies, it disappeared in the nineteen-seventies, although it remained, characteristically, a Claiborne favorite. And in 1988 Claiborne, after announcing his retirement, and learning that his team was preparing a party at the Four Seasons to mark the occasion, asked if someone might make the dish for him.

The names in the kitchen that night were a roll call from another era: André Soltner, the patron-chef of Lutèce, the country’s “best” restaurant (now closed); Alain Sailhac, of Le Cirque and the “21” Club (now retired); Georges Perrier, of Le Bec-Fin, in Philadelphia (now closed); and Gilbert Le Coze, a younger team member, who not long before had opened Le Bernardin, on the ground floor of an insurance-company building. (Le Coze died six years later, of a heart attack.) There was Pierre Franey, who had written books with Claiborne, and several honorary Frenchies: Paul Prudhomme, from New Orleans; Patrick O’Connell, from the Inn at Little Washington, in Virginia; and the ubiquitous Wolfgang Puck. And the kid, that Boulud boy. (Tell him to make Craig’s coulibiac.)

“It was an honor that the old guys trusted me,” Boulud said. The old guys might have found that their trust had been misplaced. Boulud had never actually made the dish.

He blames nouvelle cuisine: “The dish got lost in the aftermath.” Nouvelle cuisine has come to mean many things, but its most general sense describes a kitchen revolution, when, in the mid-seventies, a generation of chefs rose up and challenged just about every aspect of their culinary heritage. It has had many consequences, big and small, including a universal but unofficial code for what is no longer acceptable. Overcooked fish? Unacceptable. Salmon cooked more than medium rare? Unacceptable. Eggs boiled until they are cakey and hard and smell of a sulfurous hot springs? Unacceptable. At its most basic, a coulibiac is salmon and hard-boiled eggs in a pastry. The pastry prevents you from knowing what is going on underneath during the cooking until (Hey! What happened?) it is too late.

Boulud and I were in the basement, along with Eddy Leroux, the broad-shouldered, happy No. 2 who normally runs the kitchen at Restaurant Daniel. (Eddy has a long, tucked-behind-the ears surfer haircut—he visibly suffers when he has to smother it inside a toque—and would be so much more at ease if he could jettison the chef’s jacket for shades, a towel, and a pair of flip-flops.) Each dish we made was assigned to a chef, its “coach.” Coulibiac was Eddy’s. We were gathered around the “Mercedes,” the pastry kitchen’s high-tech state-of-the-art steam convection oven, with a hair-trigger thermostat.

It was the fourth attempt. The hope was that a better cooking device would get a better result. The pastry was the head-banger: either it was cooked through and yummy but the insides were inedible or it was undercooked and disgusting and the insides were yummy.

Boulud, well into his third decade with coulibiac, was guided, and always had been guided, by the guide of guides, the 1903 “Guide Culinaire,” by Auguste Escoffier. “Le Guide” is the equivalent of Webster’s in Scrabble. Two cooks arguing about what goes with what? One opens “Le Guide”: end of argument. Escoffier makes his coulibiac with a puff pastry. As it happens, I had become a student of puff, making it on Saturday mornings for the past two years, and was convinced that everything (puff pizza? hot dogs in a puff? chicken nuggets?) is improved by a bit of it. But a puff needs a hot oven, and takes as long as it takes; it pools butter and threatens cardiac arrest if it hasn’t finished cooking. The fish and egg were ruined in the wait.

Boulud thought that there might be a fix in the dish’s architecture, which is a variation on Russian nesting dolls. An egg is wrapped in spinach. The egg-spinach is wrapped in a salmon fillet. The egg-spinach salmon fillet is wrapped in sticky mushrooms. The sticky mushrooms are wrapped in rice, which has been made especially sticky by a sturgeon glue called vésiga (the fish’s spinal cord, boiled). And the whole sticky fishy cylinder is wrapped in pastry. For the eggs, Boulud was trying quail’s—needing less time to cook than chicken’s—and burying them between two salmon fillets, to retard the heat penetration. But it wasn’t working. He cut into the fourth effort—“Merde!”—and pushed it away in disgust.

We stared at it.

“It is a little peculiar,” I said, trying to be upbeat. It also had a peculiar name, obviously Russian. Maybe it just wasn’t French. I asked Boulud, How did it even get here?

“Oh, one of those nineteenth-century guys,” he said, mindlessly. He picked up a fork and poked the pastry. “Actually, I have no idea.” Boulud’s mood was going black fast. “One of them. All of them. They were all in Russia, hoping to get hired by a tsar.”

Boulud began having second thoughts about Escoffier. This was three days later. Boulud is an Escoffier disciple. Nandron fils was an Escoffier disciple. Nandron père was an Escoffier disciple. Disciples don’t doubt. But Boulud couldn’t stop thinking of that failed coulibiac. The pastry had been acting as though it were more important than the fish. This was wrong. So Boulud ditched it. Just like that. Bang! He abandoned Escoffier.

In the kitchen, no question, everyone was feeling a modest but undeniable buzz: Boulud ditched Escoffier? No way!

“Escoffier was never not in a suit and tie,” Boulud observed, conceding that there was something suspicious about a chef who shows up for work dressed like a banker. Boulud was going with a brioche instead—easier to brown, quicker to cook, needing less heat, and made with less butter, although still plenty, especially in the preparation he settled on, Jean-Louis Palladin’s. Palladin used two types of flour, and doubled up the eggs, or maybe it was the butter, and did he really quadruple the time to incorporate it all? Daniel said all this quickly, and never repeated it. Palladin, one of the youngest members of the nouvelle-cuisine generation, had been a friend. He was already established in France—at the age of twenty-eight, he had earned two Michelin stars, the youngest chef ever to do so—when he crossed the Atlantic, in 1979, to open what was probably the first nouvelle-cuisine restaurant in America: in Washington, D.C., not New York. Palladin died in 2001.

We were back in the basement, and a probe thermometer was inserted into our new coulibiac. The probe allows you to “see” the temperature inside a food—a wire runs out the side of the oven door to a digital device—including that of two salmon fillets wrapped around two half-cooked quail eggs inside a brioche. The whole thing then went back into the high-tech Mercedes. We waited. We did nothing. The idea was that, with so much equipment, no one needed to do anything.

Then something happened, I’m not sure what, but after ten minutes Eddy seemed to be losing his nerve, and Boulud lost his, and everyone was in a state, and the coulibiac was touched, poked, turned this way, turned back, bumped, and in every possible manner fussed with.

The oven was too hot. It was turned down to three hundred and fifty degrees.

The brioche had no color. The oven was turned up.

“It’s bubbling! I see a bubble!” It was turned down.

Eddy opened the door and poked his head inside. Why? I don’t know why. Did he know why? To see what it felt like? Because, after that, the door was never left alone. The temperature rose, fell, and did everything except stand still.

The hope was to catch fish and pastry crossing a finish line, in different conditions of doneness, at the same time: the pastry brown, crusty, crunchy, hot; the fish rosy-red, warm. But after half an hour the brioche wasn’t cooked, and, according to the probe thermometer, the salmon was cold. It would take more than an hour. This seemed impossible. You don’t cook salmon for an hour and get rare. It was ruined, obviously, when, at last, it emerged from the oven, a blast of buttery, yeasty seafood aromatics, and sat on a worktop untouched. What was the point? It was a long time before anyone cut into it and tasted it and acknowledged that this brioche coulibiac might be perfect. (Later, I consulted my copy of Escoffier. I admit that my copy was not the 1903 edition. It was the 1921 edition. I found the offending puff-pastry recipe. But: according to the 1921 Escoffier, you were actually allowed to make your coulibiac with either puff or brioche.)

I found, in all this, a resoundingly obvious lesson: if cooking knowledge is not carefully passed from one generation to the next, it doesn’t last. For instance, if you look up coulibiac in the 1938 edition of Larousse Gastronomique, you will find plenty, including an initial account of the dish’s origins, a warm pastry with fish inside, an acknowledgment of its Russianness, and a grainy photograph of a loaf-like entity, twelve steam slits on top, sitting bluntly on a platter, emanating rustic veracity. From the entry, you may not be able to replicate the dish, but you’ll understand what it is. In the recent Larousse Gastronomique, published sixty-nine years later, and edited by Joël Robuchon, a high prince of nouvelle cuisine, the passage has been rewritten. It has no picture, makes no mention of vésiga, doesn’t specify the pastry, and describes the dish in terms that suggest a sack that can be filled with meat, vegetables, fish, yesterday’s newspapers, whatever. I read the entry and thought, No idea what is being described. (A sidebar pastry-and-salmon recipe is added afterward, like a footnote.) I felt like a witness to a disappearing food history. When a dish falls out of the repertoire, the know-how goes with it. In less than seventy years, it was going, it was almost gone: pfiff.

Chad prepared two plates. The fish was between rare and medium rare. He dressed it with caviar and a butter sauce.

Boulud was looking pleased. He hesitated before putting a bite in his mouth. He knew it would be perfect. It was a rare sight. Craig Claiborne had not eaten this well.

I closed my eyes, I tasted, I thought, home.

In fact, it was nothing like what we eat at home, but it had a quality that made me think “home.” Was it because of the rice? Does rice say “home”? It was sticky and smelled lightly of the sea. This must be the vésiga. I rolled a kernel in my mouth. It was swollen. Was this the best rice of my life? The salmon was flavoring everything as well. It was like a pink butter that had melted into the other ingredients. There were no pan juices. Maybe that was the pastry’s purpose: to insure that nothing escaped. It was like a mini-oven, locking in the gummy, buttery ocean flavors.

And maybe that is the dish’s essential idea: nothing escapes. I found the same idea in a passage from Gogol’s “Dead Souls.” It is quoted under “Coulibiac” in “The Oxford Companion to Food,” edited by the late Alan Davidson. The entry cites an essay on Russian recipes by the editor’s daughter, Pamela, whom I tracked down at University College London, where she is a professor of Russian literature. A French coulibiac is under no obligation to be faithful to the Russian original, but since the Russian obviously inspired the French version I found I had plenty of questions that I wanted to put to an authoritative referee. The vésiga, for instance. Boulud got his from a fish supplier. The spine was long and white and half an inch in diameter, and had a bungee stretchiness, like an elastic lasso. The vésiga, I asked. Basically, it’s the dish, no?

It was essential. Professor Davidson corrected my spelling: “vyaziga.” This was in an e-mail. I imagined that the word is pronounced like a sneeze. (She also corrected the dish—“kulebiaka.”) Russians regard vyaziga as one of the nation’s great delicacies, Davidson said. No vyaziga, no kulebiaka. It was also like getting an expensive fish without having to pay for it. Usually the vyaziga was bought dried.

Dried sturgeon spine?

All the shops used to have it. Davidson once lived in Russia. Dried sturgeon spine was a pantry item: “Cheap, sold in shoddy little cardboard boxes.”

In the passage from “Dead Souls,” which was published in 1843, Peter Petrovich Petukh, who is short and fat, as round as a watermelon (the stomach, in Gogol, is the body’s noblest part), is telling a cook how to prepare a four-cornered pie for lunch. First of all, Petukh says, the fish should be sturgeon. (Both salmon and sturgeon can be used, Davidson confirmed.) The filling should be like a savory pudding: yes, vésiga, but also brains and cheeks and the caviar, stirred together into something creamy and rich. And the pastry is important, too, because you want it to soak up all the rich sturgeon juices. “It doesn’t crumble,” Petukh says, “but melts in the mouth, like snow, so that you don’t even feel it melting.”

It’s not puff pastry, is it? I asked Davidson.

“Puff pastry would be cheating.”

Brioche?

“A compromise.” There was a coulibiac pastry. Davidson sent me the recipe. It was a yeast dough, with milk, eggs, and oil instead of butter: like a dieter’s version of brioche.

But the instructions for the filling were alarming. There was no rice. How could there be no rice? The rice was what I liked most. I went back to the original entry in “The Oxford Companion to Food.” There was no rice. Instead, there was kasha.

Kasha? Kasha! Kasha is the hardy starch of a Slavic winter—buckwheat, in fact—but when cooked properly it gets a nutty, deep-brown crust. (You boil buckwheat, like rice; you then roast it until it is crunchy, unlike rice.) A slice of coulibiac is already dressed in the colors of the UPS man. These are the cozy chromatics of comfort. Kasha: the suggestion was thrilling and obvious. It was like adding a cello.

Restaurant food is not normally harmonic. It tends to be discordant (sweet and sour, soft and hard, fruit and savory) and intensified, more salt than you use at home, more pepper; it has texture, contrast, crackle. Probably because, in a restaurant, food is a business transaction: it wants you to notice what you have paid for. Coulibiac, in contrast, is a food of no contrasts. It isn’t a food of textures, because, in Petukh’s description, all the textures dissolve. It is a winter food. It rewards you for getting home.

I didn’t tell Boulud about my kasha findings until later. I wanted to confirm that at least one of those French chefs bombing off to Russia to get rich had come back with a genuine recipe. It wasn’t so obvious. Carême has a coulibiac recipe. It uses kasha and a rustic brioche, but makes no mention of vésiga, and seems to have been inspired third-hand by a meal that he ate or heard about in St. Petersburg. Carême had been to St. Petersburg only fleetingly, having been hired by Prince Orlov to work at the palace. (The Tsar was out of town, and Carême quit before he returned.)

Urbain Dubois was also hired by Prince Orlov, and he ended up cooking for him for many years. The dish Veau Orlov was evidently inspired by Dubois’s employer. Dubois’s first book, published in 1856, is called “La Cuisine Classique,” but its long subtitle promises to apply French know-how to Russian flair: “Études Pratiques, Raisonnées et démonstratives de l’école française appliquée au service à la Russe.” His coulibiac recipe is No. 1139. It calls for vésiga, eggs, salmon, vegetables, and a unique pastry, a coulibiac pâte, basically a yeast bread with extra eggs. The dish is made with kasha.

I told Boulud. He was not pleased. In fact, he looked unhappy. He was pacing.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I have been trying to make a coulibiac for thirty years. I have been haunted by it. Finally, I get it right. Or at least I believe I do. Now you tell me that, actually, what it needs is kasha?”

His distress was palpable. I apologized. These old dishes, I said, really, they’re good, they’re very good—in fact, they are probably better—with rice.

III. CANARD À LA PRESSE

This is no ordinary duck. It is a kick-ass duck. It is a showpiece duck. And it comes with a flashy dining-room toy.

The toy is a press. It is used to squeeze what people euphemistically refer to as the “juices” from the carcass of a scarcely roasted bird—that is, its blood. The blood is then added to a sauce. And that is the dish: a duck and its bloody sauce.

The histories (there are many, and all the same) begin in the early-to-middle nineteenth century, when the press was invented, by Méchenet—from Rouen, a city known for its big ducks. The actual date and Méchenet’s first name don’t appear to have been nailed down. What M. Méchenet invented is also unclear, if only because the invention had already been invented. In France, it is called a presse-viande (a meat press) or simply a pressoir (as in a pressoir à fruit, or à citron, or à jus): the principal is screw, squeeze down, filter out. Your great-grandfather may have used one, to crush juice from fruits. Your great-grandfather may also have used it for birds, especially pigeons, which were smothered: a smothered bird is full of juice. In the old days, bird dinners were very juicy.

What M. Méchenet probably invented was a look. It wasn’t a better duck dinner; it was a better duck show. We will never know for sure, because it would appear that no historian has glimpsed the Méchenet machine. It was “appropriated” some time before 1890 by Frédéric Delair, a restaurateur in Paris, who ran an establishment called La Tour d’Argent. Delair’s version was gigantic, plated in silver, and arrived tableside on a trolley draped in white linen. Unlike its farmhouse cousin, which could well have used a broomstick as an improvised handle to screw it down, Delair’s version was a machine. It had a shiny handwheel—one that required two hands to turn—and such an enduring sense of design that it would have been wholly apposite in an underwater vehicle devised by Jules Verne. It was a thing with bling.

Blood is an awkward ingredient in French dishes. It would seem that only one such dish is prepared tableside: canard à la presse. In 1890, Delair enhanced the aura of the preparation by numbering each duck. That year, the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, ate No. 328. His great-granddaughter Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen of England, ate No. 185,387. The rustic farmhouse tool is still available; you can find one on eBay.fr for around a hundred dollars. From time to time, you will come across the full-on Christofle silver-plated press; it currently runs between ninety and a hundred thousand dollars.

Since 1890, the Tour d’Argent’s basic recipe hasn’t changed. If you find yourself at the restaurant tomorrow, you will eat duck in the confidence that it was what someone ate a hundred years ago. You will eat it in the expectation that someone else will be served it a hundred years from now. You will find the same preparation at Michel Rostang’s, in Paris. In fact, you will find it at any establishment prepared to invest in the high theatre of presentation confected by Frédéric Delair. You can even watch a demonstration on one of the best-known shows of food television, a 1971 episode of “The French Chef,” featuring Julia Child whacking away at a carcass, at a long arm’s length, her towering frame extended and tilting backward, maintaining an awkward distance, because she is wearing a skirt and a uselessly petite apron, and bits of bone and lobs of fat are shooting off unpredictably.

The duck made by Boulud is different. Both the recipe and the press originated not in nineteenth-century France but in nineteen-thirties New York, and arrived, circuitously, via a family from Ohio.

Charles Maxwell Robertson, born in 1902, was the president of the Ralph H. Jones Company, an advertising firm in Cincinnati. He liked to hunt and fish. With his wife, Alice, who was born in 1901, he travelled: transatlantic cruises, first class; he came to New York, twice a month, by train. He was a regular at the “21” Club. It had two duck presses, possibly more, the silver-plated, wheel-it-out-on-a-trolley luxe apparatus. But, with the Depression and the repeal of Prohibition, New York’s fancy restaurants struggled, and, according to family lore, for five dollars Robertson picked up a press from the “21” Club that wasn’t being used and took it back to Cincinnati.

Alice Robertson was responsible for the recipe. In 2008, her daughter Ann Cohen, then seventy-three, found it in an attic, written out in her mother’s fine, enfeebled hand. It was a ghostly discovery. It connected her instantly to her powerful parents, their glamour, their joy at the table, all now gone. Ann mailed the recipe to a friend, Joel Buchman. Buchman, a Boulud regular and friend of the kitchen, brought it in and asked if it might work.

Yes. But he needed a press. Ann volunteered the “21” Club contraption.

Until now, typically the only “prep” in preparing a duck à la presse was acquiring the bird. Its juices were the sauce. Yes, there was veal stock, and a splash of cognac and a knob of butter, but fundamentally the dish was the duck. The Robertson recipe includes a preliminary step so self-evident that it is baffling that it hasn’t always been done. It is this: the duck is marinated. The marinade is a bottle of Port, a jar of red-currant jelly, some orange and lemon zest, and a lot of pepper; it is boiled and then cooled, and the duck is submerged in it, swelling until saturated, its own “juice” content now enriched. When the carcass is pressed, the liquid is deep and dark. It produces a sauce so unusual that, on tasting it, I finally understood that the duck is almost immaterial. The dish is what you coat it with. What matters is the sauce.

In October, 2008, a trial dinner was arranged. There were four people at the table: Ann Cohen and her husband, Joel Buchman and his wife. The duck was prepared—two ducks, actually, since it was a four-top—and Boulud completed the sauce. Ann reminisced about the annual duck dinners, the most extravagant social event at home, how the birds were Canadian and wild, flying south. “Daddy shot them,” she said, when, in a startling Banquo moment, the four-top became six, and Ann was convinced that her parents had joined them. Buchman recalls a spinal shudder. Boulud says that it was the most intensely emotional food he had made since arriving in the United States. Afterward, Ann gave the restaurant a gift: the duck press.

For Boulud, this dinner focussed a sweet-sour-sweet thought that he had been having for a long time. New Yorkers, he said, understand that dinner is an adventure. They ask more of the kitchen. They eat the way the French used to eat. Boulud had become a Frenchman who would live in New York and nowhere else. ♦

SHOUTS & MURMURS
Ask Ayn

by John Hodgman

After a couple of appearances on the interview program “Donahue,” in 1979 and 1980, the author and philosopher Ayn Rand enjoyed something of a renaissance in popular culture, including a week as a panelist on “Match Game” and a guest appearance on “Fantasy Island” as the Spirit of Capitalism. In 1980, two years before her death, she was offered a short column in “Parade.” Here are some excerpts.

What is wrong with committing suicide? What’s wrong with giving up on life? And why is the happiness of another person important and good, but not your own? And why do they make soda cans so difficult to open these days?

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I find it to be an offensive irony, a toxic irony, that Lyndon Baines Johnson—the founder of the so-called Great Society, which I consider to be the greatest insult to the individual man since Immanuel Kant first laid out his preposterous theory of the noumenal, that is to say, not objective reality—that I should share with this man, this evil man, the same love of the soft drink Fresca. They say it is a grapefruit soda, but I think it has a different flavor. What do you think?

—

My moral philosophy is founded on the idea that there is an objective reality, and that man’s senses can perceive this objective reality. This faculty, which is man’s reason, is paramount above all else. He takes for evidence only his own experience, his own judgment, and that is why I do not hesitate to say, objectively, definitively, that “Caddyshack” is the year’s best movie.

Rodney Dangerfield plays a self-made man who is not ashamed of his ambition, who does not apologize for his success, and who gets excitement from the joyful reality that we are all going to get laid if we are willing to be productively selfish and to stop coddling the weak. In other movie news, I did not like how easily the boy escaped Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.” I have solved all the hedge mazes in the United States and Europe, and I can tell you they are not that complicated.

—

Short column today. Once again, I have cut my finger trying to open a can of Fresca. What are they, made of Rearden Metal? I am joking, because I am not joyless. What is your favorite joke, readers? Write me and let me know.

—

This week, you may have seen that I was interviewed by Phil Donahue, of the television program “Donahue.” Some thought fireworks would fly, and it is true that Donahue is a collectivist and an apologist for the weak. But, if you detected that I liked him, you were correct. I cannot help it. He has a good sense of humor, and his hair is so snowy and silly. During a break, I turned to him and said, “I think you should tell your wife, Marlo Thomas, to rename her long-playing record ‘Free to Be Only Me.’ ” We laughed and laughed.

—

Some of you wrote in last week to express surprise that, when I appeared on the Phil Donahue program, I told him that I was a fan of “Charlie’s Angels.” This just shows how poor your critical thinking is. It should be obvious why I love “Charlie’s Angels.” The show is about three beautiful women who are not ashamed of their beauty or their ability at solving crimes. And when their talents were not appreciated by the police department and they were forced to become crossing guards, they refused! They refused to take money from the government to train American children to believe that the state will forever protect them from risk! They left their jobs and made new lives for themselves in a private capitalist enterprise. They went Galt. (This is a reference to my book “Atlas Shrugged,” which will be made into a movie in the year 1982, and the market will reward it with success. We have already cast Kris Kristofferson—my first choice!—as John Galt.)

—

I saw on television the performing group known as the Village People. These are very exuberant, virile men. I have no delusions; I know that they are all lesbians. But they expressed in their dancing the kind of unapologetic enthusiasm for their masculinity that so many in our culture wish to repress in favor of Alan Alda.

—

I do not approve of the so-called hippies, but I do not approve of any government control over drugs. The government does not have the right to tell any individual what to do with his or her health and life. You probably know that I received a prescription for the stimulant Benzedrine, or “speed.” I can say rationally that it increases my happiness and my productivity. For example, some time ago I went to Studio 54, because I love to dance on speed. I took fifteen speed pills, and I got into a contest with Liza Minnelli over who could roar most like a jaguar. She simply sounded like a stupid lion.

Then the inside of my head began to sound like a jet engine and so I went to the bathroom. I took maybe ten more speed pills and sat in a stall and wrote a new chapter of “Atlas Shrugged.” Perhaps twenty-five thousand words, all on toilet paper. I cannot include these words in a new edition, alas, because I did not write them so much as encode them on the toilet paper by biting it.

As I write this, I am drinking speed, and you cannot stop me. You cannot stop me, America, with your altruism and your Alan Alda and your Fresca cans biting at my skin. I shall speed across this country like a great high-speed train and the U.S. shall be forever changed in my wake.

Yes, I am both a speedboat and a speed train, and I will mix metaphors if I wish and bend language to my own reality like rails of garbage steel. Because Ronald Reagan has deposed Jimmy Carter, and I predict that by 2013 my influence will be profound, and a new generation of leaders will hallow my name, and devotion to self-interest and capitalism and the free market will not be the exception but the rule, and these leaders will naturally share my disapproval of religion, my support of abortion rights, and my love of Godiva chocolates. I have to stop writing now, because I have chewed through my typewriter.

Talk to you next week, readers of “Parade,” and remember to send me your favorite ways to spice up Hamburger Helper. I asked you that three weeks ago. ♦

ON TELEVISION
Difficult Women

How “Sex and the City” lost its good name.

by Emily Nussbaum

When people talk about the rise of great TV, they inevitably credit one show, “The Sopranos.” Even before James Gandolfini’s death, the HBO drama’s mystique was secure: novelistic and cinematic, David Chase’s auteurist masterpiece cracked open the gangster genre like a rib cage, releasing the latent ambition of television, and launching us all into a golden age.

“The Sopranos” deserves the hype. Yet there’s something screwy about the way that the show and its cable-drama blood brothers have come to dominate the conversation, elbowing other forms of greatness out of the frame. It’s a bias that bubbles up early in Brett Martin’s otherwise excellent new book, “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘The Wire’ to ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad,’ ” a deeply reported and dishy account of just how your prestige-cable sausage is made. I tore through the book, yet when I reached Martin’s chronicle of the rise of HBO I felt a jolt. “It might as well have been a tourism campaign for a post-Rudolph Giuliani, de-ethnicized Gotham awash in money,” Martin writes of one of my favorite shows. “Its characters were types as familiar as those in ‘The Golden Girls’: the Slut, the Prude, the Career Woman, the Heroine. But they talked more explicitly, certainly about their bodies, but also about their desires and discontents outside the bedroom, than women on TV ever had before.”

Martin gives “Sex and the City” credit for jump-starting HBO, but the condescension is palpable, and the grudging praise is reserved for only one aspect of the series—the rawness of its subject matter. Martin hardly invented this attitude: he is simply reiterating what has become the reflexive consensus on the show, right down to the hackneyed “Golden Girls” gag. Even as “The Sopranos” has ascended to TV’s Mt. Olympus, the reputation of “Sex and the City” has shrunk and faded, like some tragic dry-clean-only dress tossed into a decade-long hot cycle. By the show’s fifteen-year anniversary, this year, we fans had trained ourselves to downgrade the show to a “guilty pleasure,” to mock its puns, to get into self-flagellating conversations about those blinkered and blinged-out movies. Whenever a new chick-centric series débuts, there are invidious comparisons: don’t worry, it’s no “Sex and the City,” they say. As if that were a good thing.

But “Sex and the City,” too, was once one of HBO’s flagship shows. It was the peer of “The Sopranos,” albeit in a different tone and in a different milieu, deconstructing a different genre. Mob shows, cop shows, cowboy shows—those are formulas with gravitas. “Sex and the City,” in contrast, was pigeonholed as a sitcom. In fact, it was a bold riff on the romantic comedy: the show wrestled with the limits of that pink-tinted genre for almost its entire run. In the end, it gave in. Yet until that last-minute stumble it was sharp, iconoclastic television. High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of character, “Sex and the City” was a brilliant and, in certain ways, radical show. It also originated the unacknowledged first female anti-hero on television: ladies and gentlemen, Carrie Bradshaw.

Please, people, I can hear your objections from here. But first think back. Before “Sex and the City,” the vast majority of iconic “single girl” characters on television, from That Girl to Mary Tyler Moore and Molly Dodd, had been you-go-girl types—which is to say, actual role models. (Ally McBeal was a notable and problematic exception.) They were pioneers who offered many single women the representation they craved, and they were also, crucially, adorable to men: vulnerable and plucky and warm. However varied the layers they displayed over time, they flattered a specific pathology: the cultural requirement that women greet other women with the refrain “Oh, me, too! Me, too!”

In contrast, Carrie and her friends—Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte—were odder birds by far, jagged, aggressive, and sometimes frightening figures, like a makeup mirror lit up in neon. They were simultaneously real and abstract, emotionally complex and philosophically stylized. Women identified with them—“I’m a Carrie!”—but then became furious when they showed flaws. And, with the exception of Charlotte (Kristin Davis), men didn’t find them likable: there were endless cruel jokes about Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Carrie as sluts, man-haters, or gold-diggers. To me, as a single woman, it felt like a definite sign of progress: since the elemental representation of single life at the time was the comic strip “Cathy” (ack! chocolate!), better that one’s life should be viewed as glamorously threatening than as sad and lonely.

Carrie Bradshaw herself began as a mirror for another woman: she was the avatar of the New York Observer columnist Candace Bushnell, a steely “sexual anthropologist” on the prowl for blind items. When the initial showrunner, Darren Star, and his mostly female writing staff adapted Bushnell’s columns, they transformed that icy Carrie, pouring her into the warm body of Sarah Jessica Parker. Out popped a chatterbox with a schnoz, whose advanced fashion sense was not intended to lure men into matrimony. For a half dozen episodes, Carrie was a happy, curious explorer, out companionably smoking with modellizers. If she’d stayed that way, the show might have been another “Mary Tyler Moore”: a playful, empowering comedy about one woman’s adventures in the big city.

Instead, Carrie fell under the thrall of Mr. Big, the sexy, emotionally withholding forty-three-year-old financier played by Chris Noth. From then on, pleasurable as “Sex and the City” remained, it also felt designed to push back at its audience’s wish for identification, triggering as much anxiety as relief. It switched the romantic comedy’s primal scene, from “Me, too!” to “Am I like her?” A man practically woven out of red flags, Big wasn’t there to rescue Carrie; instead, his “great love” was a slow poisoning. She spun out, becoming anxious, obsessive, and, despite her charm, wildly self-centered—in her own words, “the frightening woman whose fear ate her sanity.” Their relationship was viewed with concern by her friends, who were not, as Martin suggests, mere “types” but portrayals of a narrow slice of wealthy white thirty-something Manhattanites: the Waspy gallerina, the liberal-feminist lawyer, the decadent power publicist.

Although the show’s first season is its slightest, it swiftly establishes a bold mixture of moods—fizzy and sour, blunt and arch—and shifts between satirical and sincere modes of storytelling. (It’s not even especially dated: though the show has gained a reputation for over-the-top absurdity, I can tell you that these night clubs and fashion shows do exist—maybe even more so now that Manhattan has become a gated island for the wealthy.) There is already a melancholic undertow, full of foreshadowing. “What if he never calls and three weeks from now I pick up the New York Times and I read that he’s married some perfect little woman who never passes gas under his five-hundred-dollar sheets?” Carrie frets in Episode 11. In a moment of clarity, she tells Miranda that, when she’s around Big, “I’m not like me. I’m, like, Together Carrie. I wear little outfits: Sexy Carrie and Casual Carrie. Sometimes I catch myself actually posing. It’s just—it’s exhausting.”

That was the conundrum Carrie faced for the entire series: true love turned her into a fake. The Season 1 neurotic Carrie didn’t stick, though. She and Big fixed things, then they broke up again, harder. He moved to Paris. She met Aidan (John Corbett), the marrying type. In Season 3, the writers upped the ante, having Carrie do something overtly anti-heroic: she cheated on a decent man with a bad one (Big, of course), now married to that “perfect little woman,” Natasha. They didn’t paper over the repercussions: Natasha’s humiliation, and the way Carrie’s betrayal hardened Aidan, even once he took her back. During six seasons, Carrie changed, as anyone might from thirty-two to thirty-eight, and not always in positive ways. She got more honest and more responsible; she became a saner girlfriend. But she also became scarred, prissier, strikingly gun-shy—and, finally, she panicked at the question of what it would mean to be an older single woman.

Her friends went through changes, too, often upon being confronted with their worst flaws—Charlotte’s superficiality, Miranda’s caustic tongue, Samantha’s refusal to be vulnerable. In a departure from nearly all earlier half-hour comedies, the writers fully embraced the richness of serial storytelling. In a movie we go from glare to kiss in two hours. “Sex and the City” was liberated from closure, turning “once upon a time” into a wry mantra, treating its characters’ struggles with a rare mixture of bluntness and compassion. It was one of the first television comedies to let its characters change in serious ways, several years before other half-hour comedies, like “The Office,” went and stole all the credit.

So why is the show so often portrayed as a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarrassment to womankind? It’s a classic misunderstanding, I think, stemming from an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicit about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior. Certainly, the show’s formula was strict: usually four plots—two deep, two shallow—linked by Carrie’s voice-over. The B plots generally involved one of the non-Carrie women getting laid; these slapstick sequences were crucial to the show’s rude rhythms, interjecting energy and rupturing anything sentimental. (It’s one reason those bowdlerized reruns on E! are such a crime: with the literal and figurative fucks edited out, the show is a rom-com.)

Most unusually, the characters themselves were symbolic. As I’ve written elsewhere—and argued, often drunkenly, at cocktail parties—the four friends operated as near-allegorical figures, pegged to contemporary debates about women’s lives, mapped along three overlapping continuums. The first was emotional: Carrie and Charlotte were romantics; Miranda and Samantha were cynics. The second was ideological: Miranda and Carrie were second-wave feminists, who believed in egalitarianism; Charlotte and Samantha were third-wave feminists, focussed on exploiting the power of femininity, from opposing angles. The third concerned sex itself. At first, Miranda and Charlotte were prudes, while Samantha and Carrie were libertines. Unsettlingly, as the show progressed, Carrie began to glide toward caution, away from freedom, out of fear.

Every conversation the friends had, at brunch or out shopping, amounted to a “Crossfire”-like debate. When Carrie sleeps with a dreamy French architect and he leaves a thousand dollars by her bed, she consults her friends. “Money is power. Sex is power,” Samantha argues. “Therefore, getting money for sex is simply an exchange of power.” “Don’t listen to the dime-store Camille Paglia,” Miranda shoots back. The most famous such conversation took place four episodes in, after Charlotte’s boyfriend asked her to have anal sex. The friends pile into a cab for a raucous debate about whether her choice is about power-exchange (Miranda) or about finding a fun new hole (Samantha). “I’m not a hole!” Charlotte protests, and they hit a pothole. “What was that?” Charlotte asks. “A preview,” Miranda and Samantha say in unison, and burst out laughing.

The show’s basic value system aligns with Carrie: romantic, second-wave, libertine. But “Sex and the City” ’s real strength was its willingness not to stack the deck: it let every side make a case, so that complexity carried the day. When Carrie and Aidan break up, they are both right. When Miranda and Carrie argue about her move to Paris, they are both right. The show’s style could be brittle, but its substance was flexible, in a way that made the series feel peculiarly broad-ranging, covering so much ground, so fleetly, that it became easy to take it for granted.

Endings count in television, maybe too much. “The Sopranos” concluded with a black screen: it rejected easy satisfaction and pissed off its most devoted fans. (David Chase fled to the South of France.)

Three years earlier, in 2004, “Sex and the City” had other pressures to contend with: while a mob film ends in murder, we all know where a romantic comedy ends. I’ll defend until my dying day the sixth-season plot in which Carrie seeks respite with a celebrity like her, the Russian artist Aleksandr (Mikhail Baryshnikov), a chilly genius she doesn’t love but who offers her a dreamlike fairy tale, the one she has always longed for: Paris, safety, money, pleasure. It felt ugly, and sad, in a realistic way. In one of the season’s, and the show’s, best episodes, she saw other older women settling (Candice Bergen) or falling out of windows (the hilarious Kristen Johnston, who delivered one of “Sex and the City” ’s best monologues: “When did everybody stop smoking? When did everybody pair off? . . . I’m so bored I could die”). The show always had a realpolitik directness about such social pressures; as another HBO series put it recently, winter was coming.

And then, in the final round, “Sex and the City” pulled its punches, and let Big rescue Carrie. It honored the wishes of its heroine, and at least half of the audience, and it gave us a very memorable dress, too. But it also showed a failure of nerve, an inability of the writers to imagine, or to trust themselves to portray, any other kind of ending—happy or not. And I can’t help but wonder: What would the show look like without that finale? What if it were the story of a woman who lost herself in her thirties, who was changed by a poisonous, powerful love affair, and who emerged, finally, surrounded by her friends? Who would Carrie be then? It’s an interesting question, one that shouldn’t erase the show’s powerful legacy. We’ll just have to wait for another show to answer it. ♦

BRIEFLY NOTED
You Are One of Them

by Elliott Holt (Penguin Press)

Holt’s beguiling début reimagines the story of Samantha Smith, the ten-year-old American girl who, in 1983, started a correspondence with the Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov. In Holt’s novel, the Smith character, named Jennifer Jones, moves into a house across the street from the book’s narrator, Sarah Zuckerman. The two girls form an intense friendship that unravels when Jenny rises to celebrity after her letter to Andropov is published in Pravda. Jenny tours the Soviet Union as a good-will ambassador and then dies in a plane crash with her family. A decade later, Sarah travels to Yeltsin-era Moscow (sharply evoked as “a place of new money and ancient grudges”) to retrace her lost friend’s footsteps and investigate the possibility that Jenny may still be alive. Holt’s book, in which there is no difference between personal and political betrayal, vividly conjures the anxieties of the Cold War without ever lapsing into nostalgia. ♦

BRIEFLY NOTED
Southern Cross the Dog

by Bill Cheng (Ecco)

In 1927, an epic flood engulfed Mississippi, tearing apart countless black families already mired in the savagery of the Jim Crow South. Robert Lee Chatham, the eight-year-old protagonist of Cheng’s dark, lyrical début novel, survives the disaster only to be cast adrift, clutching nothing but a stone bestowed by an ominous bluesman. Calamity follows Chatham as he stumbles from one unlikely shelter to the next—brothel, government dam project, the lair of fierce, unforgiving fur-trappers. Cheng, a Queens-born Chinese-American who had never set foot in Mississippi when he wrote the book, imbues the landscape with Faulkneresque poetry. Although the plot periodically wanders, the prose is arresting: a river is a “bold curl,” motes “spangle and gust,” and the big yellow moon molders and oozes, “blighted and bad and full,” a single “sightless eye.” ♦

BRIEFLY NOTED
Perilous Question

by Antonia Fraser (PublicAffairs)

The author of many historical biographies addresses the two-year period in the early nineteenth century when Britain, under the threat of populist revolt, considered electoral reform. Fraser writes energetically about the political wrangling, finding both humor and humanity in the struggle. She has particular sympathy for King William IV, who, in her view, “was an honest man struggling to do his best in the situation in which he found himself, even if he was not absolutely sure what that situation was.” The world she depicts is one in which a speech before Parliament may be fuelled by wine; unionists plot to create financial panic, should reform fail to pass; and the social scene, built on enormous wealth, is marked by “the gossiping of the hostesses contributing the soprano voices to the choir of rumbling political basses.” ♦

BRIEFLY NOTED
Story of My People

by Edoardo Nesi, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar (Other Press)

In 2004, Nesi, an Italian novelist and translator, was forced to sell the business that had been in his family for more than eighty years—a textile company in Prato, one of the historic hearts of Italy’s garment industry. In this blend of memoir, manifesto, and diatribe, he gives an intimate account of a homespun world, “glistening and weightless like silk,” destroyed by rapid globalization. As Italian designers turn to China for their fabrics, Prato’s weavers drop their prices to untenable lows and begin to shutter their factories. In an ironic twist, the buildings that once housed these factories are taken over by illegal Chinese immigrants, who use them to set up sweatshops. In gleefully biting prose, Nesi excoriates Italy’s politicians, its arrogant economists, and the “titanic foreign multinationals” who “sell their heartless, unimaginative rags and schmattes everywhere around the world,” promising “Giorgio Armani at Walmart costs.” ♦

BOOKS
The Right Man

Who owns Edmund Burke?

by Adam Gopnik

It may be the nicest compliment ever paid by one great writer to another. Dr. Johnson, talking to Boswell in 1784, said of Edmund Burke, writer, Parliamentarian, and fellow club member, “If a man were to go by chance at the same time with Burke under a shed, to shun a shower, he would say—‘this is an extraordinary man.’ If Burke should go into a stable to see his horse drest, the ostler would say—‘We have had an extraordinary man here.’ ” Burke retains his reputation for extraordinariness, even though what, exactly, made his thought so extraordinary may be hard to define. A “Burkean conservative” is the kind liberals pretend to want, just as conservatives like to say, in seeming praise of an opponent, “He’s a true Jeffersonian liberal.” Both mean, really, that the other guy is so pessimistic about government action that, in power, he won’t actually do anything. Burke’s doctrines are foggy even to his admirers. Let’s see, something about “the little platoons” of civil society, and then hating the French Revolution (though, wait, he liked the American one), and wasn’t there something about how mountains and storms are fun, in a scary kind of way? Burke is more a badge to be worn than a book to be read.

In “Edmund Burke in America” (Cornell), the historian Drew Maciag inventories the many contradictory roles that Burke has played in our local imagination, where, as he notes, “homage to Burke was more a profession of faith than an explanation of policy.” There’s Russell Kirk’s mystical Burke, of the early nineteen-fifties, a theological conservative whose thought was rooted in faith in a “natural law” derived from the Almighty (although Burke’s own direct statements of this faith when it comes to politics were, as Maciag says, “vague to the point of meaninglessness”); William F. Buckley’s Cold War Burke, who believed in gentlemen and hated Bolsheviks; and, finally, a staunchly pro-war, national-greatness Burke, conjured by the neoconservatives of the past couple of decades. (The book starts with the Bush Administration über-hawk Douglas Feith invoking Burke to defend the Iraq war.) Meanwhile, a new biography by the British Conservative M.P. Jesse Norman, “Edmund Burke: The First Conservative” (Basic), emphasizes a Burke who believed in stable communities, “civic virtue,” and free markets as the foundation of free nations—Burke as a mildly anti-Thatcherian figure for this new Conservative age. Unlike Thatcher, Burke certainly believed that there was such a thing as society, Norman insists, though he always thought it something other than the state.

Conor Cruise O’Brien, a fellow Irish politician and man of letters, came closest to making up a coherent Burke, a few decades back, with his fine intellectual biography, “The Great Melody.” (The phrase is from Yeats’s praise of Burke’s oratory.) O’Brien’s Burke is unapologetically various, a diva with a set of arias, but, above all, he’s a closeted Irish patriot, who hated reactionary abuses of power as well as revolutionary ones. The cause that took up more of his political life than any other was a campaign to impeach Warren Hastings, the governor general of Bengal for the British East India Company, for cruelty to the native Hindus—rather as if a contemporary Republican had spent his time in Congress crusading to have a Blackwater contractor in Iraq tried for war crimes. Yet to declaw Burke’s conservatism is to miss the blazing fury of “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” a book more prophetic than political.

Seen as a human being, rather than as a time-transcendent oracle, Burke is less that familiar species the Disappointed Radical, who swings wildly from one ideology to another, fighting for Indian dignity at one moment and for French monarchy at another, than the Shocked Liberal—the man of reform who, when reform turns to revolution, is driven around the bend by its excesses. Like those good Upper West Siders thrown for a loop by Woodstock and the Weathermen, Burke was harrowed by the Jacobins and the French Revolution. But the effect wasn’t to make him sour and stiff and drab, as usually happens to the disappointed: just the opposite. Gibbon, who was conservative in politics and infidel in religion, called Burke a “rational madman.” He meant that an element of beautiful overcharge was natural to Burke’s mind and part of his lucidity, making this reactionary a poet of the dawning Romantic style.

Edmund Burke was an Irishman with all the ambiguities that Irishmen in England felt in the eighteenth century. He was Irish to his contemporaries in the same way that Disraeli was Jewish to his: officially, not at all—Burke, who was born in 1729, probably in Dublin, spoke of himself unself-consciously as an Englishman—while, in the eyes of everyone around him, inescapably so. (The political cartoonist Gillray once drew Burke boiling a potato in a chamber pot.) His mother was a Catholic, and his father, a prosperous Dublin attorney and an Anglican, may have been reared as one. O’Brien convincingly argues that, without being a secret Roman Catholic, Burke was haunted by visions of eternal damnation. Certainly, he was always painfully aware of the brutality of a big power bullying a little one. He wrote once that there were “thousands in Ireland who have never conversed with a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to their gardener’s workmen, or to ask their way.”

Before he was thirty, Burke married a young Irish Catholic woman, and wrote touchingly precise notes on the nature of the ideal wife he thought she was (“Her smiles are . . . inexpressible; her voice is a low soft music. . . . To describe her body describes her mind; one is the Transcript of the other”). Still, one of his best biographers, the American scholar Isaac Kramnick, argued, in “The Rage of Edmund Burke” (1977), that Burke was secretly homosexual. Kramnick issues all the usual caveats about labelling someone from the past with a social category that may not have existed then (though we call him a conservative, and that category didn’t exist then, either). Yet the evidence is that Burke lived for a long time in great intimacy with another man—the confusingly named Will Burke (no relation)—and was unusually sensitive to cruelty against those accused of sodomy. When two men convicted of “Sodomitical Practices” were placed in the pillory and, in effect, tortured to death (one was struck on the head by a stone; the other, too short for the pillory, was slowly throttled by it), Burke bravely spoke up in Parliament against the horror. For his efforts, he was accused in print of being a sodomite sympathizer.

Burke’s “rage,” an uneasy, near-hysterical thrum of unresolved ambivalences, vibrates in his prose. The presiding idea of his essay on “the Sublime and Beautiful,” finished before he was twenty-nine, is more radical than is generally grasped. The conventional answer to the question about why we want to see cruelty and pain in art is that, in some complicated way, it makes us more wholesome. Burke answered, honestly, that we like to go to violent plays for the same reason that people went to hangings: not because violence improves us but because it interests us, as long as it’s happening to someone else. There is no golden mean; anything mean is golden. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime,” he writes in the essay. Or, as he puts it elsewhere, with a detachment almost like Sade’s, “Little more can be said than that the idea of bodily pain, in all the modes and degrees of labour, pain, anguish, torment, is productive of the sublime; and nothing else in this sense can produce it.” The essay on the sublime is also very good on the power of the incomplete and obscure: “To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes”—a truth that explains, among other things, why “Alien” is so much scarier than “Aliens.”

Burke writes with imagery seldom equalled in its potent eccentricity. In the midst of an extended metaphor in which the English in India are seen as frigate birds, he writes that, as they fly away from the land they have scavenged, their next “prey is lodged in England; and the cries of India are given to seas and winds, to be blown about, in every breaking up of the monsoon, over a remote and unhearing ocean.” Of the Royal Court of George III, he declares, “It is shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance and personal accommodation; it has evaporated from the gross concrete, into an essence and rectified spirit of expense, where you have tuns of ancient pomp in a vial of modern luxury.” Elsewhere in the same speech, he makes the point that lots of old British institutions no longer serve much purpose:

Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls. There the bleak winds, there “Boreas, and Eurus, and Caurus, and Argestes loud,” howling through the vacant lobbies, and clattering the doors of deserted guard-rooms, appal the imagination, and conjure up the grim spectres of departed tyrants—the Saxon, the Norman, and the Dane; the stern Edwards and fierce Henries,—who stalk from desolation to desolation, through the dreary vacuity and melancholy succession of chill and comfortless chambers. When this tumult subsides, a dead, and still more frightful silence would reign in this desert, if every now and then the tacking of hammers did not announce, that those constant attendants upon all courts in all ages, Jobs, were still alive—for whose sake alone it is, that any trace of ancient grandeur is suffered to remain.

The last passage is a joke, and the hyperbole is intended to get laughs, but it has an odd poetic intensity of its own. Though Burke is dense in argument, he always writes and speaks from raw emotion. Warren Hastings said that, during Burke’s opening oration at his impeachment, he felt like the guiltiest man on earth—such was the strength of Burke’s power of crooning and convincing.

Burke was a prodigy, and then a placeman. After his arrival in England, in 1750, his literary fame got him a job as secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, who was the leader of the Whigs—the party of aristocratic Parliamentarians, who were mistrustful of the King and of concentrated court power. Burke made his way in life by attaching himself to these Rockingham Whigs—getting elected to Parliament mostly from “pocket boroughs,” small ridings wholly controlled by local landed magnates. As Norman shows, after Rockingham’s death, in 1782, Burke’s influence dwindled, and then, after his turn toward the right during the French Revolution, he broke with the Whigs entirely. Still, the choice of politics paid off in a material way: the Irish adventurer died, in 1797, on his own grand estate. (In a nice symmetry, Burke’s estate was near Beaconsfield, the market town where that other great Conservative outsider Disraeli also found his estate and title.)

Burke’s role as spokesman for the Rockingham Whigs has dogged his reputation in England. Lewis Namier, a dominant modern historian of eighteenth-century Britain, regarded Burke as no more than an opportunist pamphleteer, a paid functionary of the Rockingham machine. Namier and his followers dismissed the idea that Burke had a mind and a philosophy or a set of influential arguments as a sentimental fantasy indulged by amateurs. The political world that Burke lived in was, Namier’s account suggests, really more like “The Sopranos” with snuffboxes than like any recognizable modern grouping of parties: various gangs of aristocrats, connected by blood ties and common interests, opposed other gangs of aristocratic oligarchs. O’Brien suggests at indignant length that the dynamic, as with Disraeli, worked largely the other way around: Burke did not find arguments for his patrons’ interests; his patrons came to understand their interests only after listening to Burke’s arguments.

The Parliamentary sinecure that Burke got from the Rockingham faction gave him what amounted to tenure, and the outline of his adult life more nearly resembles that of a modern professor than it does our idea of a politician. Burke was caricatured, again and again, as an intellectual in politics—beak-nosed, scrawny, shown as a bishop or a priest or a monk, waving books and crosses and crowns, his spectacles perched on the end of his nose. His work in Parliament, over the next thirty years, was devoted to three great subjects: the problem of America, the sufferings of India, and the meaning of the French Revolution. There is an American Burke, an Indian Burke, and a French Burke, and one of the hot topics in thinking about Burke is how different each of these is from the others.

One reason that Burke is so appealing to American conservatives is that, unlike other anti-Enlightenment thinkers, he supported the American Revolution. Actually, he was at first rather cool to the American position—partly because of its hypocrisy over slavery (“We hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes,” as Dr. Johnson said) and partly because of the Continental Congress’s hostility toward the Roman Church. But he came to doubt the wisdom of trying to rule a big country from a great distance, and of taxing people who didn’t get to vote for the people who taxed them. He thought the idea that you could run an empire on a balance sheet was crazy. Life took place in a theatre of values and traditions, and it was fatal to translate them into a merchant’s language of profit and loss. The real imperial glue had to be a commonality of interests and values. “As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you,” he argued. “Do not entertain so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are what form the great securities of your commerce.”

In those days, it took about eight weeks for a letter or a newspaper to travel between Old World and New, as mail was carried on leaky and wind-tossed boats. There was no way to know that what you were saying today hadn’t been rendered immaterial by what happened last week. Burke was well aware of the difficulty: “Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution; and the want of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat an whole system.” And yet each side’s ability to grasp the other’s position (or fail to), and to adjust its policy (or fail to) in the light of changing events, seems exactly as agile, or as clumsy, as it is today. In particular, the positions taken in Parliament sound the same as those we might have now regarding an imperial issue of our own. Some argue that to compromise with the insurgents would be to lose all credibility with other insurgents; others that just one more surge of troops will do it. We are no better, or worse, at understanding Iraq from instant video than the Brits were at understanding America from salty, soggy mail. Whatever the speed of the news, the speed of understanding never seems to change, perhaps because understanding is shaped not by our ability to get the news but by our ability to digest it. Knowing the day-to-day movements of a foreign adventure confers no more advantage than knowing the minute-by-minute movements of a stock. The range of responses is always the same: there are bulls and bears, loss-cutters and this-will-show-them-ers. When it came to America, Burke was a loss-cutter.

By far the longest and most passionate of all Burke’s political engagements was his fight to impeach Warren Hastings—who, as an executive of the British East India Company, was effectively the pro-consul representing British interests in the Indian subcontinent—for atrocities against the native peoples. The impeachment process, which stretched out over several years, involved some baroque political maneuvering, and ended with Hastings’s acquittal. Burke’s campaign has not worn well with British historians. Though the rule of the East India Company was doubtless often cruel and usually arbitrary, Hastings seems to have been far from the worst of the offenders. But Burke used the occasion to make a series of broader and still resonant points about the evils of colonial oppression. Describing the destruction of the Carnatic region of India at the hands of Hastings’s local allies, he wrote:

A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, and destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function; fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities; but escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine.

Burke’s impulses and instincts are strikingly universalist: “There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity—the Law of Nature and of Nations.” We stand aghast at the crimes of the British and their agents in India, Burke says, because the rape and murder of Hindus is just as great an offense to God as the rape and murder of our own. That is the point of his climax, where he talks, again, of the rape of the Carnatic region by a warlord on “our” side, and suddenly confronts the indifferent with the question “What would we say if it happened in England?” Burke inveighs:

When the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one four-footed beast of any description whatever. One dead, uniform silence reigned over the whole region. . . . The Carnatic is a country not much inferior in extent to England. Figure to yourself, Mr. Speaker, the land in whose representative chair you sit; figure to yourself the form and fashion of your sweet and cheerful country from Thames to Trent, north and south, and from the Irish to the German Sea, east and west, emptied and disembowelled (may God avert the omen of our crimes!) by so accomplished a desolation.

To be sure, Burke wanted a more humane imperialism, a kinder colonialism, and behind his words is the continuing prejudice of a landed interest against a commercial one: this is what happens when merchants, rather than a military and civil establishment under the control of a better class, are allowed to rule colonies. (“We never said [Hastings] was a tiger and a lion: no, we have said he was a weasel and a rat.”) But, in the long history of colonial cruelties, his speeches against Hastings and the East India Company were perhaps the first modern instance where the sufferings inflicted upon an occupied people were held up in the capital of the empire and regarded as worthy of compassion, and punishment.

The American Burke is a model of rational prudence; the Indian Burke one of imperial responsibility and sympathy. The French Burke is not only the most influential but also the most tangled. Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” was originally a letter to a French friend, which he published as a pamphlet in 1790. This was at the very start of the whole bloody business, well before the Terror gained power or the King lost his head. But Burke saw, with a frightening clarity, which way the thing was tending: the Jacobins were ready to kill anyone who would stop them from trying to remake the entire world in the image of their idealism. Burke’s case against the Revolution is precisely that there was nothing—not law or reverence or constitution—to stand between the revolutionary certitudes and the people who were subject to them. In 1790, he grasped the truth that those poor Iranian moderates Bani-sadr and Ghotbzadeh learned after the 1979 revolution in Tehran: try and play footsie with the absolutists at a revolution and you will end up playing headsies with their executioners. (Bani-sadr, who went to Iran with Khomeini, sure that he could manage the mad old man, ended up fleeing for his life two years later, to find refuge—how Clio loves her little ironies—in a well-guarded villa just outside Versailles.)

Burke’s “Reflections” is, for many, a sacred text, and sacred texts, including political ones, demand amnesia as much as they reward attention. Admirers of Burke tend to pass over the degree of sneering and second-class snobbery that fills the “Reflections.” Burke hates the Revolution in France because it will sacrifice man to plan, but also because it raised up people you wouldn’t want to dine with—hairdressers and Jews and speculators. The most famous passage in the “Reflections” is his chivalrous but overwrought hymn to the glory of poor, dim-witted Marie Antoinette: “Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men. . . . I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”

Even for Burke, the tone is oddly overwrought. Bertrand Russell once observed that a lot of the gloom of the early Church is due to the personal gloom of St. Augustine; and certain apocalyptic tendencies of modern conservatism may be due to the later Burke. It isn’t enough for him to say that something revolutionary is bad or cruel; the bad thing must be also ruthless, irredeemable, and very nearly irresistible. (And so begins that strange note, found to this day in American conservative magazines, whereby the most privileged caste in the most powerful country in the most prosperous epoch in the whole history of humankind is always sure that everything is going straight to hell and has mostly already got there.)

The Revolution in France worked its way around from the Terror to the more cautious Directory, and yet Burke never adjusted his tone. Burke was the prophet who saw Pol Pot coming when others saw Paradise, but he also saw Pol Pot coming when only more politics was on the way. When Lord Castlereagh, running British foreign policy during the end of the Napoleonic period, and refusing the Burkean demand that he wage preventive war in Europe on behalf of toppled monarchs, remarked, “This Country cannot, and will not, act upon the abstract and speculative principles of Precaution,” he was being more Burkean than Burke. The Republican principles Burke excoriated were exactly those which, after 1870, came to rule France (aside from the black hole of the Occupation) until this day, producing the wisest and wealthiest period in its history.

Burke overrates the revolutionaries so passionately that one slowly senses the odd message of this and similar paranoias: it is not that the other side has more faults; it is that the other side possesses virtues that we have surrendered. In order to fight adequately, we are going to have to regain those disciplined virtues; we will imitate even as we oppose. The Jacobins are intelligent, inspired, filled with the logic of their sacred texts, impassioned, hungry for martyrdom, tough, ruthless, ready to be selfless in the cause. (And so, later, the Communists will be, and then the Islamists.) This apocalyptic ring gives Burke’s last letters and speeches an uncanny emotional ferocity; in their half-prophetic poetic tone, they sound more like Ruskin than like Johnson, with a feeling for cryptic implication and monosyllabic incantation.

Indian Burke, French Burke—is there a Basic Burke beneath them? By “Burkean conservative,” we should really mean someone who has great respect for traditional order as a guarantor of social peace but not, on the whole, as a guarantor of liberty, except in a very limited sense. Burke’s thought reminds us that the two ideas joined in the phrase “liberal democracy” are less like Siamese twins than like a shotgun marriage. Burke was a liberal, of a sort, but not a democrat. He thought that the management of the country should be left to a class of rich farmers and professional Parliamentarians, in conjunction with a weak and biddable king, and that this was all the “democracy” anyone needed—provided that the people, in broad form, had a kind of general and respected veto on big questions, expressed, variously, through petitions, prayers, and riots.

That may sound like a terribly limited conception, but is it so far from the way politics is conducted in democratic countries? After all, in France a small class of highly educated énarques—graduates of the École Nationale d’Administration—conduct the business of the state, while in Britain, two hundred years later, Downing Street has become again an annex to the playing fields of Eton. What has expanded, one might argue, is the extent of the implicit veto. Workers have a veto now—the unions could do little to Thatcher, but she could not kill the National Health Service. Women have a veto now, as witnessed even in Missouri, when a politician says something beyond the bounds of insult. So, increasingly, do blacks and Jews, and those sodomites in the pillory can now stand up and demand that they be treated with decency. (Even a right-winger has to pretend to be concerned for their welfare, if not for their weddings.) Politics remains a highly distorted mirror of our country, but the mirror has widened.

Taking Burke seriously means taking ideas of this kind seriously, too, rather than pretending that he would have valued a gospel of success or modern mass democracy made up by “oeconomists and calculators.” A Burke brought back to life today, one feels sure, would have accepted gay marriage, as he would women’s equality, as expressions of a social order already altered from within. (Dr. Johnson put it best: “As manners make laws, manners likewise repeal them.”) Yet one also suspects that Burke would, half a century earlier, have been against desegregation, as something imposed on local communities from without. No one would have been louder about the horrors of Abu Ghraib or more inclined to bring Dick Cheney to justice for war crimes—though no one fiercer on the side of the Shah of Iran or more skeptical of the virtues of the Arab Spring. This double legacy, escaping conventional party categories, is what happens when one takes Burke seriously as a mind rather than as a sublime symbol.

That starting passage from the “Life of Johnson” may hold a clue to how best to “get” Burke now. For Johnson’s praise of Burke—the extraordinary man in the shed—doesn’t put Boswell in mind of Wilkes or Fox or Pitt or any other British statesman. It puts him in mind of Samuel Foote, the Robin Williams of the mid-eighteenth century. “Foote was a man who never failed in conversation,” Boswell says. It was natural to classify Burke as a performer. He spent his life performing, responding, reacting. The true Burke was inconsistent, as performers are: the right words depend on the night and the mood. The poor man shunning the shower in the shed would not have been impressed by the consistency of his principles. But then there were many men, in Johnson’s time, with principles so consistent that they would make you want to walk back out into the rain. It’s perfectly fair to call Burke reactionary, as long as we recall that most of his reactions were ones that any decent person would have had in the circumstances. That they were often inconsistent doesn’t make them less sane.

It was as a performer that he fastened on the theatrical, ritualistic, ceremonial side of life—the side of life that liberalism is least good at understanding or promoting. The original sin of modern liberalism lies in the idea of social life as a contract, a deal. Life is too short and horrible for us to imagine it governed by something as meagre as a contract; we want it to be governed by a covenant. The difference between a contract and a covenant may, in the cash value of action, be almost purely verbal. That’s its point. The sound is the significance. When the irrational is slighted, the unreasonable takes its place.

Burke had remarkable empathy for other people’s suffering from power, but limited sympathy for other people’s ambitions for power. He could be outraged on behalf of Hindu women raped or mutilated, but he did not think that the best way to protect them might be to let them run their own lives. Of all the critiques of Burke in his lifetime, the weirdest and wisest came from the visionary poet William Blake. Blake’s long prophetic poem “The French Revolution,” composed a year after “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” and with Blake’s usual combination of long, boring oracular bits and sharp, sweetly stabbing images, is (as the Blake scholar William Richey once pointed out), beneath the fog, a point-by-point critique of and answer to the Burke of the “Reflections.” Blake and Burke share the same impatience with reason overapplied to the wrong things; Blake’s motto, “One Law for the Lion and Ox is oppression,” could have come straight from Burke. But Blake, a man of narrower understanding but much wider sympathies, insists that Burke overestimates the residual power of the old sublime, the mists and mountains and ghosts of the ancien régime, the passing world of chivalry and nobility, and underestimates the capacity for a new kind of beauty that the Revolution might yet supply—particularly for all those guys normally stuck in sheds and stables. Burke is saying, The sublime mystery is passing! Blake is saying, Good riddance to it, as long as people can be happier in the new one. He has faith, which Burke lacked, in human fulfillment through simple pleasure rather than inherited order, and could see how pleasure might increase for the ostler and the street people inside the shed when the sun came out again.

There will come a time when all “may sing in the village, and shout in the harvest,” Blake says, “and woo in pleasant gardens,/Their once savage loves, now beaming with knowledge, with gentle awe adorned.” It’s another form of the Smile of Reason, with a sensual emphasis on the smile rather than on the reasoning. When Burke was talking away the rain, it must have been the look on his face, too. ♦

POP MUSIC
Summerstage

Old and new on the European festival circuit.

by Sasha Frere-Jones

In Europe, summer is festival season. In the current pop landscape, where live music is the only reliable source of profit, the touring circuit offers bands a chance to traverse the continent while playing a range of places, from fields to small clubs. The variety was on display at two recent events: the Roskilde Festival, in Denmark, a long-running outdoor music gathering set in the same field every year; and the Manchester International Festival, a newer event, which presents music, theatre, and every iteration of art in venues throughout the city.

Both festivals suggested that audiences could be asking more from musicians. If we now have hit records that are as sonically aggressive and daring as Kanye West’s “Yeezus,” perhaps we don’t need to see the lion’s share of our shows in traditional proscenium theatres, which date back to the Greeks. Musicians sometimes balk at the theatrical side of their job, as if pure music existed. But every recital is a spectacle.

Roskilde, a town twenty minutes from Copenhagen, is fused with its annual event. Inspired by folk festivals and Woodstock, Roskilde began in 1971, and now stretches for nine days each year. The site is a grassy circle about two miles in diameter, dotted with trees, on the southern edge of town. Most of the audience stays in a city of tents and improvised housing, and the more utopian of the campers form impromptu bands and workshops. (I did not attend the “Porridge Hack” event, much as I enjoy oatmeal.)

Roskilde hosts a distinctly catholic range of acts; this year, it included both Rihanna and Metallica, along with numerous smaller bands. In a country like Denmark, with few mega-halls, a festival like Roskilde makes sense for popular groups—it’s a break from hockey-arena acoustics, while still giving them the ability to play to sixty thousand people, as they can on the Orange Stage, the biggest of Roskilde’s eight performance spaces.

On a hot evening, Rihanna emerged in an outfit that started as a pin-striped baseball uniform and ended up somewhere else—the cap had sprouted two long flaps that formed a sort of desert-warrior headpiece. She called the enormous crowd “crazy,” and seemed genuinely happy to be appearing, but she has a regal bearing, and there’s not a lot of synchronized dancing or hyperactive showmanship. When the musical quotations piled up—Ginuwine’s “Pony” and The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”—you had the feeling you were watching the biggest, weirdest wedding band in Denmark.

Perhaps the most exciting performance took place on the smaller Pavilion stage, where the Japanese guitar legend Keiji Haino led a band called Nazoranai, with Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley, who is better known from his profound drone duo, Sunn O))). The three played an hour of interlocking noises that sounded like three weather systems colliding. Haino played echoing, strained high notes, and occasionally sang a set of wordless vocals that resembled birdsong; Ambarchi played the drums in even, rolling blasts that didn’t keep time so much as distract you from the idea that time was passing; and O’Malley performed consistent figures on the bass guitar, which just made the other two sound wilder.

The Manchester International Festival doesn’t rise to the pop heights of Metallica. Started by Alex Poots, now the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory, in 2007, the biennial event commissions work from a variety of artists and performers, few of whom can fill giant arenas. Previous years saw pieces by Björk, Rufus Wainwright, Damon Albarn, and Robert Wilson. Although a Beethoven performance, by the pianist Martha Argerich, and a blistering dramatic reading of Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy,” by Maxine Peake, suggest a conservative edge to this year’s festival, that’s misleading. Manchester is probably the most radical and important arts festival today, and if the participants are from familiar quarters they’re not doing familiar things. The interactions with the world of pop yielded two of the most thrilling shows I’ve seen in ages.

The xx are a well-known and yet still improbably young trio from London, whose music is skeletal and hushed, using almost exclusively monophonic lines and restrained rhythms. They played a traditional live show at the Ritz theatre, which lacks air-conditioning. The effect was something like listening to a record in the shower, and I left after two minutes.

But the band’s main contribution was a string of eighteen very small performances. For each show, sixty audience members assembled at the Victoria railway station and were led to an underground site. There were just enough people to coat the perimeter of a sunken square stage. The act spread out on a clear surface, lit from underneath; the walls, which were made of shimmering white fabric, were very close. We were in the xx’s brain.

The guitarist, Romy Madley Croft, and the bassist, Oliver Sims, are childhood friends who seem like lifetime lovers. Dressed all in black, the two locked eyes for much of the show, circling each other, then coming face to face, then backing away. The group’s lyrics are intensely personal and personally intense; in their work, there is no break from the long, hard night. During “Tides,” in which Croft and Sims sang together, at each other, it was hard to keep my composure. Around me, several people had already given up.

Close to the end of the show, the fabric walls fell, and we were suddenly in a room four times the size. Minutes afterward, a fabric ceiling descended, touching the head of anyone over six feet. The band finished, and we were ushered back into the daylight, after perhaps half an hour of music. It was remarkable.

A couple of days later, the visual artist Tino Sehgal demonstrated how easy it is, even without significant resources, to escape the proscenium and take live performances into dark corners. He trained a troupe of eighteen dancers and singers to perform a piece called “This Variation.” Audience members entered a pitch-black area, and heard singing and vocal percussion without amplification. The first number was “Stylo,” by Gorillaz, which was hard to concentrate on, because of the visceral worry that total dark induces. Soon, we could sense that the performers were walking through and around the audience. A low fluorescent light came on, and then we could see that we were in a concrete room measuring about twenty feet by thirty feet. The performers sang a long arrangement of “Good Vibrations,” while circulating and stopping to dance in place. The song came to a halt, and someone announced, “This variation, 2010.” A cast member with a German accent related a tale of feeling powerless and too polite, too often someone who wanted others to be happy. I could only think that, too often, we fans worry about our artists and their moods and ask too little of them, while giving them hours of our time. All Tino Sehgal needed was a room and a light fixture to make a clutch of old songs entirely new. It could happen in any city, in any kind of space. I’d pay for that. ♦

THE ART WORLD
House Philosopher

Thomas Hirschhorn and the “Gramsci Monument.”

by Peter Schjeldahl

This year’s most captivating new art work—Thomas Hirschhorn’s summerlong “Gramsci Monument,” an installation at a city housing project in the South Bronx—excites so many thoughts that you may, as I did, want help thinking them. Start with the artist. Hirschhorn, fifty-six, a rangy and intense Swiss, is on hand all day, every day, at his tree-house-like village of purpose-built shacks, set on open land amid the brick towers of the Forest Houses, which are home to thirty-four hundred people. The sprawling construction bridges a walkway and is shaded by sycamores that poke up through its raised plazas. It incorporates a library and a museum of memorabilia commemorating the humanist Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a theatre for daily lectures and performances, an office for a photocopied free daily newspaper, a micro radio station, an art classroom, an Internet center, a food kiosk, and a children’s wading pool. Residents were hired to build the facilities—of cheap lumber, Plexiglas, tarpaulins, and the signature stuff of works by Hirschhorn, shiny brown packing tape—and to staff most of them. The sponsoring Dia Art Foundation foots the costs. This is the last of four constructions in poor and working-class neighborhoods dedicated to Hirschhorn’s favorite philosophers. The others celebrated Baruch Spinoza in Amsterdam, in 1999; Gilles Deleuze in Avignon, France, in 2000; and Georges Bataille in Kassel, Germany, in 2002. The materials and the equipment of the “Gramsci Monument” will be distributed to the residents via a lottery, once the installation has been dismantled, a week after the closing date of September 15th.

Sitting at a plywood table in the installation one recent steamy day, Hirschhorn drew a circle on a piece of paper and quartered it. He labelled the segments “love,” “philosophy,” “aesthetics,” and “politics” and located his heroes at the radius points: Spinoza, love/philosophy; Deleuze, philosophy/aesthetics; Bataille, aesthetics/politics; and Gramsci, politics/love. Gramsci, who died after nearly a decade in prison under Mussolini, and whose “Prison Notebooks” are classics of political thought, qualifies as a revolutionary with a heart. He veered from Marxist economic determinism to describe class conflict in terms of culture—the “hegemony” of dominant ideas and forms requiring a growth of contrary ideas and forms from below. “All men are intellectuals,” Gramsci wrote.

Hirschhorn shrugs off the political failure of Gramsci’s hopes. His allegiance to the charismatic Italian seems a personal faith, thrown open to the world. The world, as we spoke, was peopled largely by running and playing children. On a subsequent day, tracks from Jay-Z’s “Magna Carta . . . Holy Grail” pulsed from the radio station, and local poets read in the theatre. The newspaper reprinted an interview with the blaxploitation diva Pam Grier. With Hirschhorn’s consent, the monument’s raw wooden architecture had been graced with gorgeous murals by the graffiti crew of a community organization called Xmental, one of them showing a black youth and a white youth slapping hands, with the nearby elevated No. 5 train in the background. The artist’s often stated ideal, a “nonexclusive audience,” was making the place its own.

Hirschhorn emphasizes that the monument is no social-work experiment, but “pure art.” This rings true. On three visits, my cynical antennae scanned in vain for hints of do-good condescension. Hirschhorn had solicited coöperation from forty-six projects of the New York City Housing Authority before forming a warm if sometimes bumpy partnership with Erik Farmer, the president of the tenants’ association at the Forest Houses. Farmer, who is forty-four and has used a wheelchair to get around since he was injured in a car crash, while a college student, is an impressively sage politician, committed to the interests of his community. He was the only one of the artist’s housing-project contacts who asked to read texts by Gramsci, Hirschhorn said. Farmer selected the monument’s construction crew of fifteen residents, and calmed local skeptics. (He told me that while the work was under construction “some old women said it looked like clubhouses, and they’d had enough of clubhouses.”) He considers the monument a “boost” to family life at the complex. Hirschhorn, for his part, carefully eschews any agenda. He cradles a hope that some people’s experience of the work might enhance their lives, but he makes clear that that’s out of his hands. His contributions to the program of public events brook no concession to popular appetites: the sparsely attended lectures by a young philosopher from Berlin, Marcus Steinweg, included one, the other day, entitled “Ontological Narcissism.”

The monument is art in the mind rather than of the eye. Hirschhorn has a slogan: “Energy = Yes! Quality = No!” His penchant for wrapping things in miles of irredeemably ugly packing tape neatly exemplifies both principles. Beauty has no evangelist in Hirschhorn. Nor does humor, as distinct from intellectual agility and a showman’s flair. In the course of a career that began in the late nineteen-eighties, when he was rebuffed by a left-wing graphics co-operative in Paris, for wanting to work on his own projects, he has consented to show in galleries and museums and at biennials and art fairs—and to sell collages that relate to his installations—but always with disregard for the habits of the market and of institutions. His past exhibition works have run to labyrinthine environments on themes including war and peace and consumer culture. An unforgettable one at the Gladstone Gallery, “Superficial Engagement” (2006), intermingled images of ethereal abstract art with crudely Xeroxed photographs of human bodies blown apart in terrorist bombings. The point was elusive, but the dramatization of the peaks and abysses of human behavior profoundly moved many viewers, including me.

Hirschhorn can be heavy-handed, as in an enormous rendition, last year at Gladstone, with real and simulated furniture and fixings, of the submerged casino in the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that capsized off the coast of Tuscany in 2012. Géricault’s Romantic vision of doomed shipwreck survivors, “The Raft of the Medusa” (1819), was reproduced on one wall. The forced irony thudded. Worse, a satirical emphasis on the casino’s kitschy décor had the unfortunate effect of seeming to memorialize the disaster’s victims chiefly for their bad taste. But, even when his work misfires, Hirschhorn remains the most meaningfully independent of contemporary artists. At the monument, I felt safely remote from the current art world’s baleful pressures of ravening money and pandering institutions. The democracy of the place, levelling the artist with the kids asplash in the wading pool, brought tones of Walt Whitman to mind.

Hirschhorn has said, “I’m interested in the ‘too much,’ doing too much, giving too much, putting too much of an effort into something. Wastefulness as a tool or a weapon.” He cites the potlatch rituals of Northwest Native Americans, in which leading members of the tribe both affirmed and atoned for their standing by spectacularly splurging their wealth. The French renegade philosopher Georges Bataille made much of the potlatch, as a model for economics based on gift-giving rather than on exchange; and Hirschhorn follows suit, in the coin of gratuitous service and toil.

Artistically, his method of principled generosity recalls the career and the aura of Joseph Beuys, whose assurance that “everyone is an artist” established the zone of participatory art events that Hirschhorn advances. Hirschhorn pays declared homage to Beuys—and to Andy Warhol, for collapsing high culture into popular culture with iconic imagery that is universally understood at a glance. There’s a Warholian tang to a grisaille painting on plywood of a photograph of the handsome young Gramsci, which fronts the monument. Only, unlike a Warhol Marilyn or Elvis, the image doesn’t float free of its historical moorings but invites a dive into the legacy of an exemplary thinker. The divers may be few, but there’s sorcery in the simple gesture of folding philosophy into daily life. Politically, the work steers hard toward realms of academic leftist theory, but in ways—both peculiarly sacramental and a lot of fun—that are as likely to humble tenured theorists as to exalt their profession. Nobody counts as special at the monument, except everybody. ♦

THE CURRENT CINEMA
Timely Projects

“Fruitvale Station” and “Blue Jasmine.”

by David Denby

What is the value of a young black man’s life? That question should have been settled long ago—or never asked—but it remains enragingly alive, and it has been posed again, with uncanny timing and force, in the new independent film “Fruitvale Station.” The movie is based on a true story. On New Year’s Eve, 2008, Oscar Grant III, twenty-two years old, was out with friends in San Francisco. Going home to the East Bay on a BART train, a few hours after midnight, he got into a fight with a white thug who baited him. The police removed Grant and his friends from the train and detained them at the Fruitvale station in Oakland, where Grant, lying face down on the platform, was shot by a panicked BART cop. The officer later said that he reached for his Taser and pulled out his gun by mistake. Grant died the next morning; the policeman was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, and served eleven months. In 2011, Ryan Coogler, a twenty-four-year-old African-American film student at the University of Southern California, approached the actor and producer Forest Whitaker with an idea for telling Oscar Grant’s story. Whitaker signed on immediately, and the movie was reportedly made for less than a million dollars. “Fruitvale Station” is a confident, touching, and, finally, shattering directorial début. Coogler begins with an actual cell-phone video of the killing taken by a bystander—a shaky and distant record in which we see Oscar and his friends lying on the platform, and the police, alarmed by the crowd cursing at them, trying to control the situation. We hear a shot; onlookers gasp. The rest of “Fruitvale Station” re-creates the last twenty-four hours of Grant’s life. The day surges toward the moment on the platform with an appalling finality.

Coogler uses Oscar’s cell-phone calls as a means of framing the different elements in his life. December 31st was a busy day, in which Oscar gives up selling marijuana (which has landed him in prison in the past); attempts to get back a job that he lost two weeks earlier; and buys food for his mother’s birthday party—a happy family gathering that takes place early in the evening. Michael B. Jordan (“The Wire,” “Friday Night Lights”), who plays Oscar, has a dazzling smile and an easy way about him—physically, Oscar glides through his life with complete assurance. He has an affectionate but difficult relationship with his girlfriend, Sophina (Melonie Diaz), the mother of his young daughter, whom he adores. Sophina wants him to shape up. She’s not the only one. Oscar is charming and friendly, but there’s something lost and irresolute about him that drives the people who love him crazy. It’s hard for him to be straight with them: he delays telling Sophina and his tough-talking mother, Wanda (Octavia Spencer), that he was fired. We can see from a prison sequence set in the past that he’s fearless and won’t let anyone push him around. Yet if he’s overprepared to fight for himself, he’s underprepared to earn a living and take care of a family. He’s an uncertain young man who is just possibly shifting, at the New Year, toward a steadier life.

Coogler is unafraid of emotion—Octavia Spencer, with her big round eyes and her commanding voice, anchors our angry response to the tragedy—but he hasn’t made a tearjerker. The scene at the station is a nightmare of confusion, and Coogler doesn’t make clear why the police detained only the young black men—apart from the implicit racial explanation. But he isn’t interested in settling scores or in issuing racial sermons, either. If anything, the movie offers a wistful hope of solidarity: Oscar, during his last day, has several pleasant encounters with whites. The tolerant, friendly atmosphere of the Bay Area is one reason that the finale is so heartbreaking. “Fruitvale Station” sums up Oscar’s life, but the act of summing up can tell us only so much, since a young life is still a maze of promise and indecision. From the evidence of this movie, Oscar Grant was smart and foolish, loving and irresponsible, candid and evasive, and now he’s another young black man gone.

Just to get the obvious out of the way: Woody Allen, in his startling new movie, “Blue Jasmine,” has adopted the basic framework of Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The literal-minded will call the movie derivative; I think of it as a grateful homage, a brilliant contemporary variation. In place of Blanche DuBois, the ruined Southern belle who believes in art and gentleness and depends on the kindness of strangers, Allen has given us Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), a fallen Park Avenue woman who believes in luxury and status and depends on the kindness of wealthy men. For years, her husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), a high-finance eminence, spoiled her. But Hal turned out to be a swindler—a younger Bernie Madoff—who got caught and lost everything. As the movie opens, Jasmine, broke, her nerves shattered, arrives in San Francisco and moves in with her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who works at a supermarket and lives with her two chubby and inarticulate little boys in a cramped apartment on South Van Ness. Accustomed to large, glamorous rooms, good food, and sophisticated—or, at least, affluent—company, Jasmine is offended by everything in Ginger’s working-class life. Jasmine is a snob and a liar, and, at times, delusional (she talks to herself), but, like Blanche DuBois, she’s mesmerizing. You can’t get enough of her, and Cate Blanchett, who played Blanche on Broadway only a few years ago, gives the most complicated and demanding performance of her movie career. The actress, like her character, is out on a limb much of the time, but there’s humor in Blanchett’s work, and a touch of self-mockery as well as an eloquent sadness. When she drops her voice to its smoky lower register, we know that she’s teasing the tragic mode. That edge of self-parody keeps us close to her, and we need that closeness, because we’re in for a rough ride.

Allen, who’s now seventy-seven, has become flintier as he has got older. His men and women tell one another off; the social clashes among people from different ways of life can be harsh and unforgiving. Jasmine and Ginger are not biological sisters—both were adopted—and they regard each other as hostile strangers. Sally Hawkins, the pale, tiny, chattery British actress whose nervous smile has brightened films like “Happy-Go-Lucky,” dashes around San Francisco in shapeless print dresses that hang from a string around her neck. Her Ginger is innocent of taste but good-natured; she has to bear the brunt of Jasmine’s misery while fielding troubles of her own. She was married to a surly guy (Andrew Dice Clay), and she tossed him. Her boyfriend, an auto repairman named Chili (Bobby Cannavale), is nuts about her, and excitable to the point of hysteria. Much of this plays as farce, but the sting of suspicion and social loathing animates scene after scene: when Jasmine attacks the noisy, sweaty Chili as a loser, unworthy of Ginger, he fights back and tries to destroy her. Allen, in his own way, is commenting on our increasingly unequal society: the formerly rich woman and the working-class characters don’t begin to get one another’s jokes and references; they don’t understand one another’s needs—they don’t even see them.

Allen’s camera is more active in this film than in his earlier work. He moves with the characters when they’re quarrelling and stays with them in continuous shots as physical violence erupts. The movie is curt and decisive—a “late” style, if there ever was one. After beginning with Jasmine’s arrival in San Francisco, Allen moves forward in time, but when she hears a word that sets off a memory, Blanchett’s face hardens, her eyes narrow, and, with an abrupt flat cut, Allen takes us into her past life. In the Park Avenue apartment, or in the Hamptons, Blanchett has the exercised torso, the flawless skin of a modern goddess. Allen’s eye is amused—the English racing-green walls and equestrian paintings in the apartment are almost a caricature of Wasp refinement. His own tastes may be closer to Jasmine’s Upper East Side than to Ginger’s low-rent San Francisco, but he’s satirizing the way the rich cocoon themselves in luxury to ward off the rest of life—that is, until disaster strikes, and they are no longer protected.

The miracle is that we feel for Jasmine—or, at least, our responses to her are divided between laughter and sympathy. When she takes a job as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, and the patients can’t decide when to schedule their next appointment, her irritation at their fumbling is both funny and recognizable. Jasmine flings herself at a Bay Area scion—an ambitious State Department official, played by Peter Sarsgaard—just because he has the right monied tone and wears his hair fashionably long in the back. As their affair begins, her relief is palpable; she glows again, if only for a moment. “Blue Jasmine” may be derived from Williams, but Allen has merged Williams’s fable with the reality of 2013. Jasmine’s economic slide, to one extent or another, has been experienced by millions of Americans. In all, this is the strongest, most resonant movie Woody Allen has made in years. ♦

FICTION
“Collectors”

by Daniel Alarcón

Rogelio was the youngest of three, the skinniest, the least talkative. As a boy, he slept in the same room as his brother, Jaime, and his earliest, most profoundly comforting memories were of those late nights, before sleep: the chatter between them, the camaraderie. Then Jaime left for San Jacinto, and shortly afterward, when Rogelio was eight, his father died. In the months after that, Rogelio began skipping school to spend hours walking in the hills above town. He liked to be alone. He gathered bits of wood, and used his father’s tools to carve tiny animals—birds, lizards, that sort of thing—which he kept in a box under his bed. They weren’t particularly lifelike, but they were surprisingly evocative, and, at age twelve, he presented one to a girl he liked, as a gift. With trembling hands and a look of horror on her face, the girl accepted it, and for the next week she avoided his gaze. The other children whispered about him whenever he came near. There was no need to hear the exact words; their meaning was clear enough. The following year, Rogelio quit school officially, and his mother and his sister agreed that there was no practical reason for him to stay in town any longer, so he left to join Jaime in San Jacinto.

Rogelio was small for his age, but tough, good with his hands and his fists. He didn’t have a temper, the way his brother did. Instead, he possessed an equanimity that his family found almost disconcerting. He’d been shunned all his life, or that’s how he felt, and he’d grown accustomed to it. He loved his brother, looked up to him, and never worried about whether Jaime loved him in return. He could follow instructions, had decent mechanical intuition, but, unlike most of his classmates, he had not learned to read. Jaime tried to teach him, but soon gave up: the boy kept confusing his letters. More than a decade later, Henry Nuñez, Rogelio’s cellmate in Collectors prison, explained to him that there was a condition called dyslexia. “How about that?” Rogelio said, but his face registered nothing—not regret or shame or even curiosity—as if he were unwilling to contemplate the ways in which his life might have been different if he’d had this information sooner.

For the first couple of years in San Jacinto, he worked on the broken-down trucks that his brother bought on the cheap. Together, they would cajole these heaps of rusting metal back to life. Each machine was different, requiring a complex and patient kind of surgery. Parts were swapped out, rescued, jerry-rigged. It was as much invention as repair. When a truck was reborn, they sold it, and reinvested the profits, which weren’t much at first, but the brothers were very careful with their money. In a photograph from this time, Rogelio sits on a gigantic truck tire with his shirt off; he is lithe and wiry, and he wears the blank expression of a child who asks no questions and makes no demands of the world. Not a happy boy, but, given his situation, perhaps a wise one.

Eventually, Jaime bought his kid brother a motorbike, the kind outfitted with a flatbed of wooden planks in front. This machine became Rogelio’s source of income for the next few years; he rode it around the city, from one market to another, carrying cans of paint, lashed-together bundles of metal pipes, chickens headed for slaughter, crammed into crates stacked so high that he had to lean to one side in order to steer. San Jacinto was growing steadily, but not yet at the torrid pace that would later come to define it; Rogelio knew every corner of the city then, and years later, at Collectors, he would draw a map of it on a wall of the cell that he shared with Henry, using white chalk to trace the streets and the railroad tracks, and to label the apartment he’d shared with his brother.

Henry asked him why he’d gone to the trouble.

“Because one day I’ll go back there,” Rogelio said.

In 1980, the year Rogelio turned seventeen, Jaime took him to a brothel near the center of town. It was the first of its kind, and had been built for the hoped-for wave of young, fearless men with money. There were rumors of gold in the hills, and the brothel’s fantastical anteroom paid tribute to those stories: the walls were painted gold, as were the bar and the wooden tables and chairs. In fact, that night even the three prostitutes on display for Rogelio’s choosing had followed the color scheme: one in a gold miniskirt, another in gold lace panties and bra, and the third in a gold negligee. Three little trophies, all smiling coquettishly, hands on their hips. Jaime encouraged Rogelio to pick one, but he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. The moment stretched on and on, far past what was comfortable, until the girls’ put-on smiles began to fade. And still the boy stood there, immobilized, amazed.

“Oh, fuck it,” Jaime said finally. He pulled a wad of bills from his pocket and paid for all three.

It seems that Jaime had begun to sell more than refurbished vehicles.

When Rogelio was eighteen, he traded in his motorized cart for a small loading van and, shortly after, traded the van for a truck that he brought back to life with his own hands. The first time the reconstructed engine turned over was one of the proudest moments of Rogelio’s life. Each new vehicle expanded his world. Now he was a driver; he ferried a dozen laborers down to the lowlands, men who stood for hours without complaint as the truck bounced along rutted and bumpy roads. Once there, Rogelio discovered a prickly kind of heat he’d never felt before. He liked it, and began volunteering to drive that route whenever it was available.

The following year, his brother sent him in the other direction, over the range to the west; and on that trip Rogelio saw the ocean for the first time. It was 1982; he was almost twenty years old. He sat at the edge of the boardwalk in La Julieta as the fancy people of the city strolled by, confident-looking men in blazers and women in bright dresses, boys he took to be his age but who appeared to possess a variety of secrets that Rogelio could only guess at. None so much as glanced in his direction. He wondered if he looked out of place, if they could tell that he was a stranger here, or if they could even see him at all. But when he considered the ocean Rogelio realized how insignificant these concerns were. He was happy, he told Henry later, and in prison he liked to remember the hours he’d spent there, gazing at the sea.

For the next few years, Rogelio drove the route to the coast, to the lowlands, and back again, carrying vegetables to the city, raw materials to the mountains, laborers to the jungle. He was a quiet young man, still a boy in some ways, but he was dependable. He began to ferry other packages as well, small, tightly bundled bricks, which he kept under the seat or in a compartment hidden above the wheel well. One or two at first, then dozens. These were delivered separately, to other contacts. Rogelio never opened them to see what was inside (though he knew); he never touched the money (though he assumed that the quantities in play were not insubstantial). He had no qualms about this work. He trusted his brother. He never considered the consequences, not because he was reckless but because what he was doing was normal. Everyone was doing it.

On the last of these trips, Rogelio’s truck was searched at a checkpoint along the Central Highway, sixty-five kilometres east of the capital. The war was on, and the soldiers were randomly stopping trucks from the mountains to look for weapons and explosives. Rogelio was unlucky. Perhaps if he’d been more astute he could have arranged to pay the soldiers off, but he didn’t. Instead, he waited by the side of the road while the men in uniform went through his vehicle with great care. Rogelio had time to consider what was happening, how his life was changing course before his very eyes. Not everyone has this privilege; most of us miss the moment when our destiny shifts. Later, he told Henry that he’d felt a strange sort of calm. He considered running into the hills, but the soldiers would have shot him without thinking twice. So instead he admired his truck, which he’d had painted by hand, emerald and blue, with the phrase “My Beautiful San Jacinto” splashed across the top of the windshield, in cursive lettering. At least, that’s what he’d been told it said. He recalled thinking, What will happen to the truck? Will it be waiting for me when I get out?

The soldiers found the package, and to protect his brother Rogelio said nothing about its origins. He played dumb, which wasn’t difficult. Everyone—from the soldiers who conducted the search, to the policemen who came to arrest him, to his ferocious interrogators, to the lawyer charged with defending him—saw Rogelio as he assumed they would: as a clueless, ignorant young man from the provinces. All these years, and nothing had changed: he was still invisible.

Henry’s route to Collectors was very different, and it began at the Teatro Olímpico, after the third performance of his controversial play “The Idiot President.” That morning, one of the right-wing papers had declared the play outrageous. “It mocks our authorities and gives succor to the enemy,” the critic wrote. Henry had celebrated. “Maybe now we will sell some tickets,” he’d said to a friend.

But that night, after the show, there were two men in dark suits hanging about. No one paid much attention to them, least of all Henry. Then the theatre emptied, the audience dispersed, and one of the men approached. “Are you Henry Nuñez?” he said.

Henry had a leather bag thrown over his shoulder, nothing inside but some dirty clothes and a few annotated scripts.

Who were these idiots, who asked inane questions, when the entire theatre universe knew he was Henry Nuñez. Who else, exactly, could he be?

They placed their giant hands on Henry. His friend and co-star Patalarga emerged from backstage just in time to see what was happening. He tried to stop the men, and when he wouldn’t shut up they knocked him out and locked him in the ticket booth.

Henry was held with little human contact in a mercifully clean though still unpleasant cell. He was questioned about his friends, his plays, his travels around the country, his motives, but it was all strangely lethargic, inefficient, as if the police were too bored to decide his fate. He wasn’t beaten or tortured, which was a great relief, of course; he surely would’ve confessed to anything at the mere threat of such treatment. On the third day, Henry, still thinking, breathing, and living in the mode of a playwright, asked for a pen and some paper in order to jot down notes about his tedious imprisonment, things to remember should he ever want to write about his experience. He was denied, but even then, in his naïveté, he wasn’t worried. Not truly concerned. If he’d been asked, Henry would have said that he expected to be released at any moment. His captivity was so ridiculous to him that he could hardly conceive of it. He just couldn’t understand why anyone would be upset by “The Idiot President.” Had they seen the play? It wasn’t even any good!

On the fifth or sixth day, when Henry was finally allowed a visitor, his older sister, Marta, appeared at the jail, representing the entire living world outside the small cell that held him—his family, his friends, his supporters. It was a burden that showed clearly on her face. Her eyes were ringed with dark bluish circles, and her skin was sallow. She hadn’t eaten, she reported; in fact, no one in the family had stopped to eat or rest for five days, and they were doing everything they could to get him out. He imagined them all—his large, bickering extended family—coming together to complete this task: it would be easier to put them on shifts and have them dig a tunnel beneath the jail. The image made him smile. Marta was happy to see that Henry hadn’t been abused, and they passed much of the hour talking about plans for after his release. She had two children, a daughter and a son, ages six and four, who’d both made him get-well cards, because they’d been told that their uncle was at the hospital. Henry found this amusing; the fact that the cards had been confiscated at the jail he found maddening. Marta assured him that they’d remember this little anecdote later and laugh about it.

“Why wait?” Henry said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” his sister answered. But already she was suppressing a grin.

He was referring to a game they’d played as children: spontaneous, forced, meaningless laughter. With diligence, they’d perfected this skill—rolling around, cackling, rubbing their bellies like lunatics, before doctor’s appointments or family trips, or on the morning of an exam for which they hadn’t prepared. They’d used it to get out of chores, to be excused from church. Neither recalled the game’s origins, but they’d been punished for it on many occasions and had always feigned innocence. We can’t help it, they’d both said, laughing still, tears pressing from the corners of their eyes, until their behavior had landed them in weekly sessions with a child psychologist. Even so, they were proud that they’d never betrayed each other. At the peak of the game, when Henry was ten and Marta twelve and they were as close as two human beings can be, the two of them had been able to manufacture laughter instantly, hysterical fits that lasted for a quarter of an hour or longer. Henry considered this his first successful dramatic work.

He insisted. “Why not?”

They’d been whispering until then, but now they took deep breaths, like divers preparing for a descent. The cell, it turned out, had good acoustics. The laughter was tentative at first, but soon it was ringing brightly through the jail. Unstoppable, joyful, cathartic. At the end of the block, the guards who heard it had a different interpretation: it was frightening, demonic, even. No one had ever laughed in this jail, not like that. One of them rushed to see what was happening, and was surprised to find brother and sister laughing heartily, holding hands, their cheeks glistening.

The hour allotted for the visit had passed.

Leaving the jail, Marta gave a brief statement to the press, which was shown on the television news that evening. Her brother was completely innocent, she said. He was an artist, the finest playwright of his generation, and the authorities had interrupted him and his actors in the legitimate pursuit of their art. Those responsible should be ashamed of what they’d done.

The following day, the charges against Henry were announced: he was being held for incitement and terrorism. An investigation was under way. Henry was informed of the accusations that morning by the same guard who’d discovered him and Marta laughing, and who refrained from making the obvious statement about who might be laughing now—a small mercy, which Henry nonetheless appreciated.

He was taken from the jail in the back of a windowless military van, with nothing to look at but the unsmiling face of a soldier, a stern man, who did not speak. Henry closed his eyes, and tried to follow the van’s twisting path through the city. “We’re going to Collectors, aren’t we?” he asked the soldier, who answered with a nod.

On the morning of April 8, 1986, Henry entered the country’s most infamous prison.

The day he was sent to Collectors was the loneliest of his life. Nothing he’d learned previously had any relevance anymore, and each step he took beyond the gate and toward his new home was like walking into a tunnel, away from the light. He was led through the prison complex—a vision of Hell in those days, full of half-dead men baring their scarred chests, impervious to the cold. He’d never been more frightened in his life. One man promised to kill him at the first opportunity—that evening, perhaps, if it could be arranged. Another, to fuck him. A third looked at him with the anxious eyes of a man hiding a terrible secret. Two guards led Henry through the complex, men whom he’d previously thought of as his tormentors but who now seemed more like protectors—all that stood between him and this anarchy. Halfway to the block, he realized that they were as nervous as he was, that they, like him, were doing all they could to avoid eye contact with the inmates who surrounded them. At the door to the block, the guards unlocked Henry’s handcuffs and turned to leave.

The playwright looked at them helplessly. “Won’t you stay?” he asked, as if he were inviting them in for a drink.

The two guards wore expressions of surprise. “We can’t,” one of them said in a low voice, embarrassed. They turned and hurried back to the entrance.

An inmate led Henry into the block, where men milled about with no apparent order or discipline. I’m going to die here, he thought. It was an idea that all new inmates contemplated upon first entering the prison. Some of them, of course, were right. Henry was taken to his cell, and didn’t emerge for many days.

When Henry arrived in Collectors, Rogelio had already been waiting more than eighteen months for a hearing in his case. Waiting, that is, for an opportunity to affirm that he was a victim, that he knew nothing about the laws of the country, that he’d never been educated, and could not, therefore, be held accountable.

Henry’s family had tried to arrange for a private cell, but none were available. He knew that he should be grateful for what he had—many others were in far worse conditions—but, under the circumstances, he found it difficult to muster much gratitude. For the first few days, he hardly stirred. He didn’t register Rogelio’s face, and he knew nothing of his new home, beyond what he’d managed to glean during that initial terrifying walk. Henry was given the top bunk, and for three days he slept long hours, or pretended to sleep, facing the wall. Thinking. Remembering. Trying to disappear. He didn’t eat, but felt no hunger. The night of his arrest had been catalogued in his mind, divided into an infinite series of micro-events: he remembered each flubbed line of the performance, the expressions on the faces of the audience members who’d expected and hoped for better. Could any of those details be shifted slightly—just enough to alter the outcome? Was there a light revision he could make to that evening’s script so that it would not end with him here, in Collectors?

During those three days, Rogelio came and went, seemingly uninterested in and unconcerned by Henry’s condition. But, by the fourth day, Rogelio had had enough. He tapped Henry on the back.

“You’re allowed to get up, you know.”

Henry rolled over.

“You’re alive,” Rogelio said.

That afternoon, Henry took his first real walk through the block. He met a few people who would later become friends, or something like friends, and he saw much to remind him of the danger he was in. There were men whose faces seemed congenitally incapable of smiling, men who locked eyes with him and spat on the ground. When he shuddered, they laughed.

Rogelio wasn’t talkative, but he was helpful, and he explained many things that day. According to him, Henry was lucky—it was clear that he wouldn’t have to work (“You’re rich, aren’t you?” Rogelio asked), though almost everyone else inside did. Rogelio repaired old plastic chairs (he shared a workshop on the roof with a few other men), and made pipes out of bent metal scraps, which he sold to the junkies. The junkies were everywhere, a miserable lineup of broken men, who roamed the prison offering sex or blood or labor for a fix. Rogelio wasn’t proud of this work, but without it he wouldn’t have survived. His brother sent money only occasionally, enough to cover the cost of the cell and little else. Otherwise, he was on his own.

Neither Henry nor Rogelio owned the cell where they slept. It belonged to the boss, Espejo, who made extra money on visiting days by renting it out so that men could be alone with their wives. “Those days will be difficult,” Rogelio warned. Henry would have to be outdoors all day, and in the evening the room would smell different and feel different. He’d know that someone had made love there, and the loneliness would be overwhelming.

Henry nodded, though he couldn’t understand—wouldn’t understand, in fact, until he lived through it himself. There was a lot to learn. There were inmates to steer clear of, and others whom it was dangerous to ignore. There were moments of the day when it was safe to be out, others when it was best to stay inside. The distinction depended not on the time of day but on the mood of the prison, which Henry would have to learn to read if he hoped to survive.

“How do you read it?” he asked.

Rogelio had a difficult time explaining. It involved listening for the collective murmur of the yard, watching the way certain key men—the barometers of violence in the block—were carrying themselves. Small things: Did they have their arms at their sides, or crossed in front of them? How widely did they open their mouths when they talked? Could you see their teeth? Were their eyes moving quickly, side to side? Or slowly, as if taking in every last detail?

To Henry, it sounded impossible.

Rogelio shrugged. “Remember that most of us here are scared, just like you. When I first came, I didn’t have a cell. If there was trouble, I had nowhere to go.”

They were sitting in a corner of the yard, beneath a dull gray winter sky. The light was thin, and there were no shadows. Henry still didn’t quite grasp how he had got here. Nowhere to go—he understood these words in a way he never could have before. He wrote letters to his sister, cheerful dispatches that didn’t reflect the gloom he felt, or the fear. His letters were performances, stylized and utterly false outtakes of prison life. In fact, he was despairing: This is what it means to be trapped. To be frightened, and to be unable to share that fear with a single soul.

“You’ll get it,” Rogelio said. “It just takes time.”

The frenetic daily exchange of goods and services went on about them. Two men waited to have their hair cut, sharing the same day-old newspaper to pass the time. A pair of pants, a couple of sweaters, and T-shirts stolen from some other section of the prison were for sale, hanging on a line strung between the posts of one of the soccer goals. Three junkies slept sitting up, with their backs against the wall, shirtless in the cold. Henry saw these men and felt even colder.

“Where did you sleep back then?” he asked. “Before you had a cell.”

“Under the stairs,” Rogelio said. He laughed. “But look at me now!”

Henry did look.

His new friend had a bright smile and very large brown eyes. His skin was the color of coffee with milk, and he was muscular without being imposing. His clothes were mostly prison-scavenged, items left by departing men, appropriated by Espejo or some other strongman, and then sold. Nothing fit him well, but he seemed unbothered by that. He kept his black hair very short, and wore a knit cap most of the time, pulled down low, to stay warm. These dark winter days, he even slept with it on. His nose was narrow and turned slightly to the left, and he had a habit of talking softly, with a hand over his mouth, as if sharing a confidence, no matter how mundane an observation he might be making.

As if we were accomplices, Henry thought.

A few weeks later, Henry saw a man being kicked to death, or nearly to death, by a mob that formed unexpectedly at the door to Block 12. He and Rogelio stood by, horrified at first, then simply frightened. Then, almost instantaneously, they accepted the logic of the attack: every victim was guilty of something. The chatter: What did he do? Who did he cross? The men watching felt safer. Less helpless. A crowd gathered around the victim, but no one moved to help him.

Visiting days weren’t so bad at first. Henry’s family and friends took turns coming to see him, the ones who could tolerate the filth, the overcrowding, the looks from the junkies. They left depleted and afraid, and most didn’t come back. The hours immediately after the visitors had gone were the most difficult of the week. It required a great collective energy to welcome so many outsiders, to put the best face on what was clearly a terrible situation. Collectors was falling apart; anyone could see that. Damp winters had eaten away at the bricks, and the walls were covered with mold. Every day, new men were brought in. They were unchained and set free inside, forced to fight for a place to sleep in the already overcrowded prison. Family day, when women were allowed in, came on alternate Wednesdays, and was especially brutal. By the end of the afternoon, the inmates were worn out from smiling, from reassuring their wives and children and mothers that they were all right. (Fathers, as a rule, did not visit; most of Henry’s fellow-inmates didn’t have fathers.) It wasn’t uncommon for there to be fights on those evenings. As long as no one was killed, it was fine, just something to relieve the tension.

Nine weeks in, Henry felt almost abandoned. On family days, he was as alone as Rogelio. Espejo rented out their cell, and in the evening, as they lay on their bunks, they could still feel the warmth of those phantom bodies. Their perfumed scent. It was the only time the stench of the prison dissipated, though, in some ways, this other smell was worse. It reminded them of everything they were missing. Henry had been unable to persuade any of the women he used to see to visit him, and he didn’t blame them. None of these relationships had meant much to him, though at times his despair was so great that he could concentrate on any one of those women’s faces and convince himself that he’d been in love. As for Rogelio, he was far from home, and hadn’t had a visitor, male or female, in months.

“Did you see her?” Henry asked one evening after the visitors had gone, and, because Rogelio hadn’t, he began to describe the woman who’d made love with her husband on the lower bunk that day. She was married to an inmate named Jarol, a thief with a sharp sense of humor and arms like tense coils of rope. Henry talked about the woman’s curves, how delicious she’d looked in her dress—not tight, but tight enough. She had long black hair, doe eyes, and fingernails painted pink. She was perfect, he said, and she was: not because of her body or her face but because of the way she’d smiled at her husband, with the hungry look of a woman who wants something and is not ashamed of it. A man could live on a look like that.

Henry said, “She didn’t care who saw.”

He could hear Rogelio breathing. They were quiet for a moment.

“What would you have done to her?” Rogelio asked. His voice was very low, tentative.

This was how it began: with Henry speculating aloud about how he might spend a few minutes alone with a woman in this stifling, degrading space. He had no difficulty imagining the scene, and he could think of no good reason not to share it.

He would have torn off that dress, Henry said, and bent her against the wall, with her palms flat against that stupid map of San Jacinto. He would have pressed hard against her, teased her until she begged him to come in. From the bottom bunk, Rogelio laughed. He would have made her howl, Henry said, made her scream. Cupped her breasts in his hands and squeezed. Is this why you came, woman? Tell me it is!

Already Henry was disappearing into his own words. He had his eyes closed. The walls had begun to vibrate.

“What else?” Rogelio said, his voice stronger now. “Go on. What else would you do?”

When they finished, each on his own bunk that first time, both men laughed. They hadn’t touched, or even made eye contact, but somehow what they’d done was more intimate than that. For a moment, the pleasure of each had belonged to the other, and now something dark and joyless had been banished.

A week later, Henry gathered up his courage and went to see Espejo, the boss, to propose doing a production of “The Idiot President” in Block 7. Espejo was a small but well-built man, whose lazy grin belied a long history of violence, a man who’d risen far enough from the streets to relax and now controlled the block through sheer force of reputation. If any inmate questioned his authority, he dispensed pointed but very persuasive doses of rage. Mostly, though, he protected his charges—there were fewer than two hundred men in the block, and after nightfall they were in constant danger of being overrun by one of the larger, more ferocious sections of the prison. Espejo directed a small army of warriors tasked with keeping those potential invaders at bay.

Henry was afraid of this man, but he reminded himself that, as fellow-inmates of Block 7, he and Espejo were on the same side. Espejo’s cell seemed more like a comfortable student apartment, with a squat refrigerator, a black-and-white television, and a coffeemaker plugged into a naked outlet. Espejo kept a photo of himself from his younger days framed above his bed. In the picture, he was shirtless, astride a majestic white horse, riding up the steps of a swimming pool, toward the camera. A few delighted women stood behind him, long-legged, bronzed, and gleaming in the bright sun. Everything was colorful, saturated with tropical light. A child—Espejo’s son, perhaps—sat on the edge of the diving board, watching the horse maneuver its way out of the water. On the boy’s face was an expression of admiration and wonder, but it was more than that: he was concentrating, watching the scene, watching his father, trying to learn.

Henry wondered what had happened to the boy. Perhaps he’d been shuttled out of the country, or died, or perhaps he was old enough by now to be living in another of the city’s prisons, in a cell much like this one. There was no way of knowing without asking directly, and that was not an option. The photo, like the lives of the men with whom Henry now lived, was both real and startlingly unreal, like a still from Espejo’s dreams.

Rogelio had warned Henry not to stare, so he didn’t.

“A play?” Espejo said when Henry told him his idea.

Henry nodded.

Espejo lay back on his bed, his shoeless feet stretched toward the playwright. “That’s what we get for taking terrorists in the block,” he said, laughing. “We don’t do theatre here.”

“I’m not a terrorist,” Henry said.

A long silence followed this clarification, Espejo’s laughter replaced by a glare so intense and penetrating that Henry began to doubt himself—perhaps he was a terrorist, after all. Perhaps he always had been. That was what the authorities were accusing him of, and outside, in the real world, there were people arguing both sides of this very question. His freedom hung in the balance. His future. Henry had to look away, down at the floor of the cell, which Espejo had redone with blue and white linoleum squares, in honor of his favorite soccer club. One of Espejo’s deputies, a thick-chested brute named Aimar, coughed into his fist, and it was only this that seemed to break the tension.

“Did you write it?”

Henry nodded.

“So name a character after me,” Espejo said.

Henry began to protest.

Espejo frowned. “You think I have no culture? You think I’ve never read a book?”

“No, I . . .” Henry stopped. It was useless to continue. I’ve already ruined myself, he thought.

They were quiet for a moment.

“Go on,” Espejo said finally, waving an uninterested hand in the direction of the yard. “If you can convince these savages, I have no objection.”

Henry thanked Espejo and left—quickly, before the boss could change his mind.

Everyone wanted to be the president, because the president was the boss. Everyone wanted to be the servant, because, like them, the servant dreamed of murdering the boss. Everyone wanted to be the son, because it was the son who actually got to do the killing in the play. It was this character whose name was changed: he became Espejo.

And, indeed, the project sold itself. A week of talking to other inmates, and then the delicate process of auditions. Henry had to write in extra parts to avoid disappointing some of the would-be actors. It was for his own safety—some of these men didn’t take rejection very well. He added a chorus of citizens to comment on the action; ghosts of servants past to stalk across the stage in a fury, wearing costumes fashioned from old bed sheets. He even wrote a few lines for the president’s wife, played with verve by Carmen, the block’s most outspoken transvestite. Things were going well. Even Espejo joined in the enthusiasm. It would be good for their image, he was heard to say.

Rogelio wanted to audition, too, but there was a problem.

“I can’t read,” he confessed to Henry. “How can I learn the script?”

Henry smiled. They were lying together on the top bunk, close, naked.

“I can teach you.”

Later, he’d remember the look on Rogelio’s face, and the hope implicit in his own offer. Perhaps by saying these words, Henry was already imagining a life outside those walls.

When Rogelio didn’t respond, Henry pressed him. “Who do you want to be?”

Rogelio thought for a moment. “The servant is the one who dies?”

Henry nodded.

“How?”

“He’s stabbed in the back.”

“Well, then,” Rogelio said, “I guess that should be me.”

When the play was performed, three weeks later, Henry paid special attention to that scene. He and Rogelio had worked on the script every night, pacing in their cell, bouncing the servant’s lines back and forth until Rogelio knew them by heart, but he had insisted on practicing the death scene on his own. Out of timidity, Henry thought, but when he saw the performance he realized that he had been wrong. The entire population of Block 7 was watching: hard, fearless men who gasped at the sight of Rogelio staggering. They recognized the look of terror on his face. They’d been that man; they’d killed that man. They watched Rogelio fall in stages, first to his knees, then forward, clutching his chest, as if trying to reach through his body to the imaginary knife wound. Henry and the others, all of them held their breath, waiting, and were rewarded with a final flourish: Rogelio’s right leg twitching. Espejo was the first to stand and applaud. The play wasn’t even over.

Henry was released that November, thinner, older, after a year and a half in prison. He didn’t say to Rogelio, “I’ll wait for you.” Or, “I’ll see you on the outside.” But he thought those things, held them secret, but dear, until the day, a few months later, when two of the more volatile sections of Collectors rose up to protest conditions inside. Block 7 had the misfortune of sitting between them, and when the Army arrived to put down the revolt, it, too, was destroyed. Henry heard the news on the radio. The men who had made up the cast of “The Idiot President” all died in the assault, shot in the head, or killed by shrapnel, or crushed beneath falling concrete walls. More than three hundred inmates from Blocks 6, 7, and 8 were killed, and, though Henry wasn’t there, part of him died that day, too. He lost Rogelio, his best friend, his lover—a word he had never used, not even to himself. In the days after, he sometimes woke with the taste of Rogelio on his lips. Sometimes he woke to the image of Rogelio lying dead of a knife wound.

Henry mourned, even roused himself enough to participate in a few protests in front of the Ministry of Justice (though he declined to speak when someone handed him the bullhorn), but, in truth, the tragedy both broke him and spared him the need ever to think about his incarceration again. No one who’d lived through it with him had survived. There was no one to visit, no one with whom to reminisce, no one to meet on the day of his release and drive home, feigning optimism. ♦

POETRY
“We All Want to See a Mammal”

by Elizabeth Bradfield

We all want to see a mammal.

Squirrels & snowshoe hares don’t count.

Voles don’t count. Something, preferably,

that could do us harm. There’s a long list:

bear, moose, wolf, wolverine. Even porcupine

would do. The quills. The yellowed

teeth & long claws.

Beautiful here. Peaks & avens.

Meltwater running its braided course, but we want

to see a mammal. Our day our lives incomplete

without a mammal. The gaze of something

unafraid, that we’re afraid of, meeting ours

before it runs off.

Linnaeus was called

indecent when he named them. Plenty

of other commonalities (hair, live young,

a proclivity to plot). But no. Mammal.

Maman. Breasted & nippled

& warm, warm, warm.

POETRY
“Monster”

by Dariusz Sośnicki

The train, which I took back

across the great plain,

I tell you, it was a monster

with a swollen belly.

It had a lair in Puławy,

ravened in Warsaw;

children greeted it

and it swallowed them.

Now they’re playing together—

the boys from the blocks,

the girls with matches,

Aesculapius in a palaestra.

Their parents have managed

to toss each one a toy:

hamsters in an aquarium,

a PlayStation, and a stamp album.

The parents are getting older,

longing consumes them,

now it’s they who come

to greet the travellers.

They look at their watches

through dark glasses,

and would like to light up,

but where’s the fire?

Until the icebreaker Sadness

weighs anchor.

Until the Summer School

of Common Language begins.

I was there, I know what I’m saying,

it was a thick monster—

the train, which I took back

across the great plain.

(Translated, from the Polish, by Piotr Florczyk and Boris Dralyuk.)

TABLES FOR TWO
ABC Cocina

38 E. 19th St. (212-677-2233)

by Amelia Lester

It seemed a preposterous idea from the restaurant proprietor Jean-Georges Vongerichten: a slightly spartan, vegetable-centric restaurant in the dark, low-ceilinged recesses of an upscale furniture store in the Flatiron district. But when ABC Kitchen opened, in 2010, the shiny veneer of health imparted by the chef Dan Kluger’s cleverly seasonal menu made it one of the city’s most popular restaurants. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Vongerichten and Kluger took Kitchen’s savvy, snacky sensibility one step further and opened a tapas joint. After all, they didn’t need to look far: their new place, ABC Cocina, has taken over the old Pipa space, also associated with ABC Carpet & Home, one street up from Kitchen. Gone are Pipa’s heavy wooden chairs and non-ironic chandeliers; the warehouse-like room is now decorated in adherence to the quintessentially noughties philosophy that if something can be made of Lucite it should be.

ABC Cocina’s Web site studiously avoids making claims that the food is from any particular place—instead, the restaurant is a “modern global exchange,” which means that the sizable bar can serve sangria, margaritas, and caipirinhas. As is always the case with margaritas, you will order one of the fancy ones, seduced by the promise of basil and grapefruit and guajillo, but will discover, fifteen dollars later, that the best of the lot is the good old classic. There are two kinds of sangria. Surprisingly, the white one, made with passion fruit, is not too sweet, and actually tastes like wine, not cordial. The caipirinha on a recent evening was made with strawberries from the Union Square farmer’s market, mint from the roof, and, a waiter proudly announced, no added grain sugar.

The price of the tacos has attracted some consternation online. They vary in quality. The fourteen-dollar glazed-short-rib taco, for instance, is served with frizzled red onions, bullies of the vegetable world that inevitably overpower both the short rib and the accompaniments (in this case, a habanero relish). The chef explained that the slider taco came from an initial thought that a burger was needed on the menu; later, he turned the Wagyu patties into taco meat and drizzled yellow secret sauce on top.

The unevenness of the menu seems to arise from an impulse to make everything seasonal, even if it doesn’t suit the dish. You might wonder why the perfectly good guacamole needs to be topped with sweet peas and sunflower seeds, but then marvel at the light, bright sugar-snap-pea salad, which is tossed with a house-made sour cream. There’s also an outstanding raw shaved-fluke appetizer, made up of ribbons of fish and mint, crunchy puffed rice, and a tangy green-chili dressing. Under “rice” is the restaurant’s crown jewel: a rousing rendition of arroz con pollo, with plenty of glistening crackling skin and just enough lemon zest. You will enjoy it the next day as leftovers, because it’s a mountain of rice, and it will taste even better for breakfast. (Open weekdays for lunch and dinner and weekends for brunch and dinner. Plates $7-$24.) ♦

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Eye on America

by Vince Aletti

Paintings by Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, and Franz Kline have been displaced from their positions in MOMA’s permanent-collection galleries to make way for a roomful of Walker Evans pictures. They’re hung in celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the museum’s first one-person photography show, “American Photographs,” and its even more influential catalogue. The new exhibition’s location—between galleries devoted to Pollock, de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol—places Evans in the context of artists who understood that his cool, seemingly matter-of-fact modernist vision was crucial to the development of the American avant-garde. As in 1938, the exhibition includes pictures of people and places, many of them made under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration, the New Deal agency charged with documenting rural poverty. But Evans was never a strictly objective observer; for all their blunt simplicity, his photographs are sharply opinionated, as “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” his 1941 collaboration with James Agee, made quite clear. In his essay for “American Photographs,” Lincoln Kirstein describes Evans as both a “visual doctor, diagnostician rather than specialist,” and “the family physician, quiet and dispassionate.” However one defines his role, the photographer made work that was at once plainspoken and eloquent—images that still define something essential and true about America and Americans. ♦

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Paul is Live

by Ben Greenman

Paul Weller began his career in the seventies, as the leader of the Jam, one of the standard-bearers of the Mod revival and a vital link between classic rock bands like the Who and tuneful punks like the Clash. Over the years, he has continued to evolve, embracing soul music (forming the group the Style Council) and canonical Britpop (releasing the solo album “Stanley Road”) and collaborating with a wide range of people (everyone from the Canterbury prog-rock icon Robert Wyatt to the New Orleans stalwart Dr. John). As he has rounded the corner of middle age, Weller has kept in close contact with his influences without losing his adventurous spirit. Last year’s release, “Sonik Kicks,” a No. 1 album in the U.K., was a high-water mark in a career that has seen its share of incoming tides. Weller, who is on a mini-tour of the U.S., plays a few shows around New York City, including one at the Apollo Theatre on July 25. During his last (and first) show there, in 2010, he said, “So many of our heroes have played here. We just hope we do it justice,” and covered Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You).” ♦

CLASSICAL NOTES
Hudson Valley Heavyweight

by Russell Platt

If there’s any evidence (besides rising real-estate prices, of course) for the Hudson Valley’s new semi-chic status, it’s Bard SummerScape, the annual performing-arts cavalcade that Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, has commanded since 2002. The whole effort is a glorious paradox. It wouldn’t exist but for the colossal ambition of one man—le festival, c’est moi—and yet the artistic riches that Botstein, who is also the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, in New York, has given audiences over the years have been exceptionally generous, even if his own performances are not always as polished as one would hope.

“Stravinsky and His World” is the theme of this year’s Bard Music Festival. But to offer a production of “The Rake’s Progress,” well known at the Met, would be too obvious—hence the arrival of Sergey Taneyev’s formidable “Oresteia,” from 1895 (performed July 26-Aug. 4), a piece that Stravinsky admired and that prefigures the twentieth-century master’s penchant for subjects from classical antiquity, a topic further explored in the Bard performances of Stravinsky’s “Perséphone” and “Oedipus Rex” (Aug. 18), featuring such standout singers as Jennifer Larmore and John Relyea. The overstuffed festival also includes such Stravinsky favorites as “Les Noces” and the “Symphony of Psalms” (both on Aug. 9), as well as works by composers who influenced him (Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov) and by those he influenced in turn (Poulenc, Copland, Piston, and Carter).

It’s hardly surprising that the Bard Music Festival (which Botstein established in 1990) lies at the core of the SummerScape schedule. What’s unusual is that the other offerings—dance, theatre, and film—are all bent to Botstein’s musical theme. Audiences have already taken in Bill T. Jones’s dance work “A Rite” (inspired by you know what) and a theatrical adaptation of Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”; still to come are the final weekends of the film festival (July 26-27 and Aug. 2-3), which will trace Stravinsky’s impact on such directors as Cocteau, Chabrol, Rivette, and Godard (“Pierrot le Fou”). Those seeking escape from Stravinsky’s shadow can repair to SummerScape’s Spiegeltent, which offers performances by such edgy entertainers as the vocalist Justin Vivian Bond (Aug. 2-3), the cellist Maya Beiser (Aug. 9), and the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus (Aug. 16-17). (Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. fishercenter.bard.edu.)

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
In Situ

by Joan Acocella

Mark Dendy is known for his large-scale site-specific works. He has staged dance-theatre pieces in an abandoned tobacco-processing plant in North Carolina, in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, and even at the Metropolitan Opera. On July 24-25, at six o’clock, Lincoln Center Out of Doors is presenting his new show “Ritual Cyclical,” in a very complicated site, Hearst Plaza, which is basically the whole north end of Lincoln Center. To the music of the Kronos Quartet, eighty dancers will sport through the beautiful grove of plane trees, wiggle around in the concrete niches on the side of the Met, and get wet, next to the Henry Moore, in the reflecting pool—among other activities. “Every day,” Dendy says, “every New Yorker comes into contact with about two hundred thousand other people, and they all depend on each other. So in this piece we do this thing called New York City together.” Inside it, though, there will be a little story (boy meets girl) that starts in the water. Dendy says he got it from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” ♦

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Upstairs Down

by David Denby

Is “The Servant” the nastiest movie ever made? (It screens at Film Forum July 26-Aug. 1.) In 1963, the American expatriate director Joseph Losey, working with a script by Harold Pinter (based on Robin Maugham’s novel), created a brilliant but almost laughably vile snake pit of appalling manners, lust, and degradation. In London, a handsome but stupid upper-class lazybones (James Fox) hires a manservant (Dirk Bogarde) to cook and keep house. Aided by his libidinous so-called sister (Sarah Miles), the servant coddles, dominates, and humiliates his master. The movie has been called a parable of Britain’s postwar decay, but that seems a rather grandiose view of what is essentially an amusing set of power rituals that degenerate into outright sadism and masochism. The movie’s sexual knowingness is at times baffling—the atmosphere is heterosexual and homosexual at the same time. (Only the British could make sex seem so dirty.) Losey does masterly work in confined spaces, and Bogarde’s performance as the scheming servant sets the standard for sly corruption. ♦

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
This Week

The Theatre

LOVE SO WELL

Classical Theatre of Harlem offers Shakespeare in an uptown park, with a free production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” at the newly renovated Richard Rodgers Amphitheatre, in Marcus Garvey Park. The director, Justin Emeka, incorporates West African dance and capoeira.

Night Life

HEY, BIG FELA

The Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival opens with a bang, as the Nigerian Afro-pop innovator Fela Anikulapo Kuti is fêted by his longtime drummer and music director Tony Allen. He’ll be joined in the Damrosch Park Bandshell by the Kronos Quartet, the dance-rock group Superhuman Happiness (which includes members of Antibalas, tUnE-yArDs, and Iron and Wine), and many others.

Classical Music

WELCOME BACK

Salzburg will always be Mozart’s home, but every summer he takes up residence in New York. This year’s Mostly Mozart Festival begins with a free preview concert at Avery Fisher Hall, with Louis Langrée conducting symphonies by Mozart (No. 40 in G Minor) and Beethoven.

Movies

STATUESQUE

For the first time in its fifteen-year history, the summer outdoor screening series at Socrates Sculpture Park, in Queens, has been programmed by Film Forum, which presents such modern classics of world cinema as Fatih Akin’s “The Edge of Heaven,” Hong Sang-soo’s “In Another Country,” and Agnès Varda’s “The Gleaners and I.”

Above and Beyond

WINGING IT

Blame Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”: bats are among the most misunderstood species on earth. But what’s not to like about an animal that can consume half its weight in flying insects in one night? Wave Hill hosts a twilight walk with the naturalist Paul Keim to observe the creatures.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
The Theatre

OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS

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

FIRST DATE

This new musical, starring Zachary Levi (“Chuck”) and Krysta Rodriguez (“Smash”), follows a high-strung young man and a skeptical young woman—and the voices in their heads—as they make their way through a blind date. With music and lyrics by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner and a book by Austin Winsberg (“Gossip Girl”). Bill Berry directs. In previews. (Longacre, 220 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200.)

HARBOR

Primary Stages presents the New York première of a comedy by Chad Beguelin, about a woman who brings her fifteen-year-old daughter to her brother’s idyllic home in Sag Harbor. Mark Lamos directs. In previews. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)

HIPPOLYTUS

American Thymele Theatre offers a free production of the Euripides play, in which a celibate prince rejects Aphrodite in favor of Artemis. July 23-24 at the East River Park Amphitheatre; July 25 at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park; and July 27 at Theatre 777 (call for reservations). (212-868-4444.)

I’M GETTING MY ACT TOGETHER AND TAKING IT ON THE ROAD

“Encores! Off-Center” presents the musical by Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford, from 1978, about a singer attempting a comeback with new songs about women’s liberation. Renee Elise Goldsberry stars; directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall. July 24-27. (City Center, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212.)

I FORGIVE YOU, RONALD REAGAN

In this play by John S. Anastasi, an air-traffic controller is plagued by a rebellious political decision he made twenty years earlier, in the eighties. Starring P. J. Benjamin and Patricia Richardson; Charles Abbott directs. In previews. Opens July 30. (Beckett, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200.)

KING KONG

Alfred Preisser and Randy Weiner adapted this original take on the classic love story, incorporating hip-hop music and setting it in the South Bronx in the nineteen-seventies. Preisser directs the SummerStage production, which begins July 30, playing first in Herbert Von King Park and moving to other city parks throughout August. (670 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn. 718-622-2082.)

LET IT BE

A Beatles tribute band performs the hits, in a show that originated in London’s West End. Opens July 24. (St. James, 246 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200.)

LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

The Public’s Shakespeare in the Park concludes with an update of the Shakespeare comedy, directed by Alex Timbers, with music by Michael Friedman. The cast includes Daniel Breaker, Rachel Dratch, and Rebecca Naomi Jones. In previews. (Delacorte, Central Park. Enter at 81st St. at Central Park W. 212-967-7555.)

MURDER FOR TWO

Scott Schwartz directs this farcical musical comedy, revolving around a murdered novelist. Joe Kinosian wrote the music and Kellen Blair wrote the book and the lyrics. Part of Second Stage’s Theatre Uptown series. In previews. Opens July 25. (McGinn/Cazale, 2162 Broadway, at 76th St. 212-246-4422.)

MURMURS

In this Lincoln Center Festival presentation, Aurélia Thierrée stars in a theatre piece created by her mother, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, which uses puppetry and low-tech circus elements to create a surreal adventure. July 24-28. (Gerald W. Lynch Theatre, John Jay College, 524 W. 59th St. 212-721-6500.)

SOUL DOCTOR

Eric Anderson stars in this biographical musical about Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who befriended Nina Simone and went on to write and perform religious Jewish music in the style of soul and gospel, which became popular during the era of free love. With a book by Daniel S. Wise, lyrics by David Schechter, and music by Carlebach. Wise directs. In previews. (Circle in the Square, 235 W. 50th St. 212-239-6200.)

NOW PLAYING

THE CASTLE

In the seven years that Stucley (David Barlow) and his men have been off fighting in the Crusades, his strong wife, Ann (Jennifer Van Dyck), has taken up with a highly romantic witch, Skinner (Jan Maxwell), and together the two women have dismantled the village’s patriarchal institutions, including the church and slavery, and created what they think is a less oppressive environment. When Stucley and his men return, they reinstate the institutions and begin building a castle so large that, instead of protecting against violence, it will invite it. Howard Barker’s 1985 play, directed by Richard Romagnoli for PTP/NYC, uses this Sophocles-like story to explore the suffering that both men and women cause in the name of freedom. More symbolic than naturalistic, it’s hard to follow, but it is gorgeously written and acted—especially by Maxwell—and it deserves to be on a grander stage, in front of a larger audience. (Atlantic Stage 2, at 330 W. 16th St. 866-811-4111.)

HANDBOOK FOR AN AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY

Matthew-Lee Erlbach wrote this one-man show, in which he plays several characters in order to paint a broad picture of the attitudes of modern Americans. Tony Speciale directs. (Gym at Judson, 243 Thompson St. 212-352-3101.)

ICE FACTORY 2013

The annual festival continues with a presentation by Built for Collapse of “Red Wednesday,” written and directed by Sanaz Ghajarrahimi, which examines relations between the U.S. and Iran. (New Ohio Theatre, 154 Christopher St. 888-596-1027.)

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Classical Theatre of Harlem mounts the Shakespeare romance play, in a free outdoor production, directed by Justin Emeka. (Richard Rodgers Amphitheatre, Marcus Garvey Park, enter at 124th St. at Fifth Ave. 347-688-6304. Through July 30.)

NOBODY LOVES YOU

A clever throwaway musical by Itamar Moses (book and lyrics) and Gaby Alter (music and lyrics), courtesy of Second Stage. Jeff (Bryan Fenkart) is a scholar of ontology, so naturally he sees right through the phoniness of reality TV. Nevertheless, he winds up on a dating show, in an attempt to win back his ex-girlfriend. The viewing audience goes gaga for his cynicism, and he falls for a comely production assistant (Aleque Reid), who also thinks the show is baloney. Alter and Moses (known for his brainy comedies) write buoyant pop numbers that carry hints of knowingness, but the musical would be utterly forgettable if not for Michelle Tattenbaum’s stellar cast, including Lauren Molina, Rory O’Malley, and Heath Calvert. (305 W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422.)

ROGERANDTOM

Richard (Richard Thieriot) and Penny (Suzy Jane Hunt) are breaking up, but Penny’s brother Roger (Eric T. Miller)—who apparently would be devastated by the news—is coming to town to attend her other brother Tom’s play, so the unhappy couple agree to pretend that all is well for the short time that Roger is around. In Julien Schwab’s surreal comedy, nimbly directed by Nicholas Cotz, that setup gets blown to bits when Roger appears out of the audience, looking for Tom, the writer of the play the audience has been watching. Roger has no idea who Penny is (she’s definitely not his sister), or Richard, and he doesn’t understand why they’re putting on a play about his visit to see Tom. The meta twists keep coming, and the more nuts things get (and they get pretty nuts) the more fun this light, whimsical, very well-acted play about the imagination is. (HERE, 145 Sixth Ave., near Spring St. 212-352-3101.)

SERIOUS MONEY

In her 1987 pitch-black comedy, revived by PTP/NYC, Caryl Churchill imagines the world of British and American finance just after Margaret Thatcher deregulated the British stock market and opened up the trading floor to any lowborn sociopath with a knack for making money. Churchill’s play has story lines—one about a corporate takeover, another about a young trader trying to solve her brother’s murder—but mostly it’s a two-hour-plus spectacle: sixteen gifted actors play more than thirty nasty characters who, under the direction of Cheryl Faraone, sing and dance and speak in verse studded with trader lingo. (A glossary of stock-market terms is provided in the program.) In the late eighties, a theatrical event depicting a stageful of greedy Wall Street types feasting on their ill-gotten gains was prescient; in 2013, it’s old news, cleverly rehashed. (Atlantic Stage 2, at 330 W. 16th St. 866-811-4111.)

OUT OF TOWN

HUDSON VALLEY SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL

“King Lear” (in repertory with “All’s Well That Ends Well” and “The Three Musketeers”) stars Stephen Paul Johnson as a rather robust Lear. His infirmities are more the result of a troubled mind than of a failing constitution, but they’re just as life-threatening. The director, Terrence O’Brien, has fashioned an exciting narrative that favors power over pity, as the fine company, featuring Jason O’Connell as a noble Kent, Ryan Quinn as a coolly villainous Edmund, and Jessica Frey as a headstrong Cordelia, employ time-honored Shakespearean technique, declaiming without electronic amplification, and with admirable compassion. (Garrison, N.Y. 845-265-9575.)

POWERHOUSE THEATRE

Vassar and New York Stage and Film’s annual summer festival continues with Mozhan Marno’s “When the Lights Went Out” (through July 28), directed by Kate Whoriskey, and “A New Musical Inspired by the Brooklyn Hero Supply Company” (July 26-28), written by Simon Rich and Peter Lerman, based on characters created by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman; Michael Mayer directs. (124 Raymond Ave., Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 845-437-5599. Through July 28.)

WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL

On the Main Stage, Nicholas Martin directs Robert Sean Leonard as Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” (through July 27). On the Nikos Stage beginning July 24, Gordon Greenberg directs “Johnny Baseball,” a musical with a book by Richard Dresser, music by Robert Reale, and lyrics by Willie Reale, about the curse of the Boston Red Sox. (Williamstown, Mass. 413-597-3400.)

ALSO PLAYING

THE ASSEMBLED PARTIES: Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200. Through July 28. BUYER & CELLAR: Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow St. 212-868-4444. KINKY BOOTS: Hirschfeld, 302 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. MATILDA THE MUSICAL: Shubert, 225 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. MONKEY: JOURNEY TO THE WEST: David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-721-6500. Through July 28. 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. Through July 27. PIPPIN: Music Box, 239 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. RODGERS + HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA: Broadway Theatre, Broadway at 53rd St. 212-239-6200. THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL: Stephen Sondheim, 124 W. 43rd St. 212-239-6200. THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY: New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St. 212-239-6200. VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE: Golden, 252 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. 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.

APOLLO THEATRE

253 W. 125th St. (800-745-3000)—July 25: Paul Weller (see the Critic’s Notebook).

THE BELL HOUSE

149 7th St., Brooklyn (718-643-6510)—July 26: The Muffs, purveyors of spirited power pop, are veterans of the alternative-rock boom of the nineties. Led by the Los Angeles singer Kim Shattuck, they made it to the majors, but a big commercial hit has eluded them so far. Still, as the WFMU d.j. Michael Shelley says of Shattuck’s songwriting, “Her Brian Wilson-meets-the Ramones approach is such a bull’s-eye, why mess with a good thing?”

BLUE NOTE

131 W. 3rd St. (212-475-8592)—July 23-24: A fairly rare appearance by Seu Jorge, the super-cool Brazilian singer and actor who starred in the 2002 film “City of God” and who provided comic relief to Wes Anderson’s “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” with his acoustic Portuguese-language renditions of David Bowie songs. Jorge recently released a groovy party album, “Músicas para Churrasco.”

CITY WINERY

155 Varick St. (212-608-0555)—July 25: Iris Dement brings her inimitable voice and touching compositions to town. July 27: No musician more fully personified the classic spirit of Stax Records than Memphis’s Booker T. Jones, whose M.G.’s were, for decades, one of America’s greatest bands. Now the soulful organist is back on the label. His new album, “Sound the Alarm,” pairs him with contemporary artists, but the best tracks, “Fun” and “Feel Good,” are unadulterated Booker T., reviving that old-time joy. July 28 and July 30: Burton Cummings. In 1965, the Canadian group Chad Allan & the Expressions had a hit with “Shakin’ All Over,” which their label credited to Guess Who?, hoping that the record-buying public might mistake the sound for that of the Beatles. The band eventually dropped the question mark, added Cummings as lead singer, and went on to chart twenty singles, including “These Eyes,” “Laughing,” and “American Woman.”

GLASSLANDS GALLERY

289 Kent Ave., between S. 1st and S. 2nd Sts., Brooklyn (No phone)—Until recently, the dilapidated bathrooms, blown-out P.A. system, and distracting cloud installation above the stage made this charming, bilevel industrial venue in South Williamsburg seem like an avant-garde theatre space. But, now that this part of Brooklyn is going through a bit of an upgrade (Whole Foods is moving in around the corner), Glasslands has followed suit. It has tidied up, changing the art work and putting in a new sound system. It celebrates its seventh birthday on July 25, with a special bill of top acts, to be announced.

LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL

July 26-27: Sinéad O’Connor. The Irish chanteuse takes on songs from the soul era, in a night billed as “The Gospel Sessions.” She’ll be joined by members of the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Soul Stirrers, and her band is directed by the composer and pianist Bob Telson. There will also be guests from the Inspirational Voices of the Abyssinian Baptist Church. (Alice Tully Hall. 212-721-6500.)

LINCOLN CENTER OUT OF DOORS

A highlight of this year’s festival is the fortieth anniversary of the Kronos Quartet. The group is appearing on bills with a number of pop acts, including Tony Allen (leading a tribute to Fela Kuti, on July 24); My Brightest Diamond and Emily Wells, on July 25; and Dan Deacon and Jherek Bischoff, on July 28. (See Classical Music for more listings.) (lcoutofdoors.org. Through Aug. 11.)

MAXWELL’S

1039 Washington St., Hoboken, N.J. (201-653-1703)—July 30: The guitarist and singer Lee Ranaldo, a co-founder of Sonic Youth. Note: This storied venue is closing the following night, with a big show featuring Richard Barone and the Bongos.

MERCURY LOUNGE

217 E. Houston St. (212-260-4700)—July 26: In the late sixties, Roger, Larry, and Ben Miller, teen-age brothers from Ann Arbor, formed Sproton Layer, a guitar-driven proto-indie band whose hard rock was brightened by Barrett-era Pink Floyd sounds and jarring psychedelic effects. The Millers later became known for other projects (Roger for Mission of Burma and Larry and Ben for Destroy All Monsters), and their high-school recordings did not surface until recently. They’re playing their first shows in forty-three years, joined by the trumpet player Harold Kirchen.

MUSIC HALL OF WILLIAMSBURG

66 N. 6th St., Brooklyn (718-486-5400)—July 27: Paul Weller (see the Critic’s Notebook). July 28: Ghost B.C. This proto-metal act hails from Sweden, and while its gimmicky stage show has prompted dissent among purists, that gimmick has won over numerous fans. The group performs in hooded robes, while the vocalist, Papa Emeritus II, dons a skull mask and the ornate regalia of a satanic cardinal. They perform here with Skeletonwitch.

“RIVERROCKS”

Pier 84, Hudson River at W. 44th St. (212-627-2121)—July 25: Foxygen, a young, scruffy-looking bicoastal duo, are making a name for themselves with mutant retro rock. Their début album, “We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic,” is full of obvious nods to the Stones, the Kinks, and Dylan, but they pull it off with such aplomb that it’s hard for fans of a certain age to turn away. Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, a plucky, folksy outfit from California, shares the bill.

SUMMERSTAGE

Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, mid-Park at 69th St. (212-360-2777)—July 28: The Rock Steady Crew celebrates its thirty-sixth anniversary, joined by Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth, Brand Nubian, Special Ed, and many others.

TOWN HALL

123 W. 43rd St. (212-840-2824)—July 29: Earlier this year, the Louisville-based troubadour Bonnie (Prince) Billy (a.k.a. Will Oldham) and the Bay Area singer and yodeler Dawn McCarthy released “What the Brothers Sang,” a sumptuous homage to the music of the Everly Brothers. The new record, which reprises the pair’s emotionally wrenching 2006 collaboration, “The Letting Go,” is straightforward in its love and respect for the Everlys’ rich vocal harmonies and pleasantly unorthodox in its laid-back presentation. Most appealing is the contrast of Oldham’s dry, laconic delivery and McCarthy’s spine-tingling voice, one of the more compelling instruments in contemporary music.

“WARM UP”

For those who are interested in the movers and shakers of the music and performance-art world, the curatorial committee at MOMA PS1’s annual outdoor summer music series is often as interesting as the eclectic lineups. This year’s committee includes Brandon Stosuy, an editor and heavy-metal scholar at Pitchfork; Dean Bein, the founder of the boutique label True Panther Sounds; and Matt Werth, the head of RVNG International. The July 27 program features sets from three U.K. d.j.s—Daniel Avery, Ben UFO, and A Guy Called Gerald—as well as appearances by Devon Welsh and Matthew Otto’s muted, melancholy, and grotesquely introspective pop act, Majical Cloudz. (22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens. 718-784-2084.)

WEBSTER HALL

125 E. 11th St. (212-353-1600)—July 26: Paul Weller (see the Critic’s Notebook).

JAZZ AND STANDARDS

BIRDLAND

315 W. 44th St. (212-581-3080)—July 23-27: The Masters Quartet. The name doesn’t lie. The quartet features the pianist Steve Kuhn, the saxophonist Dave Liebman, the bassist Buster Williams, and the drummer Billy Hart, each an unquestioned champion on his instrument.

BLUE NOTE

131 W. 3rd St. (212-475-8592)—July 25-28: The Odean Pope Saxophone Choir finds additional heft in its special guests James Carter (on the first two nights) and David Sánchez (on the last two).

CORNELIA STREET CAFÉ

29 Cornelia St. (212-989-9319)—July 26-27: Ellery Eskelin, a wily tenor saxophonist who keeps both feet in the present while judiciously reconsidering the jazz tradition, joins up with the organist Gary Versace and the drummer Jochen Rueckert.

DIZZY’S CLUB COCA-COLA

Broadway at 60th St. (212-258-9595)—July 23-24: The Chilean vocalist Claudia Acuña refracts standards and Latin material through a contemporary prism.

IRIDIUM

1650 Broadway, at 51st St. (212-582-2121)—July 28: The formidable trumpeter Brian Lynch, long associated with both Phil Woods and Eddie Palmieri, fronts his own quartet.

JAZZ STANDARD

116 E. 27th St. (212-576-2232)—July 25-28: Among the many events celebrating the revered saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who turns eighty in August, is this ambitious tribute by the trumpeter Wallace Roney. He has been much influenced by Shorter’s former musical collaborator Miles Davis, and here he will present the première of “Universe,” a through-composed piece that Shorter wrote during his sixties stint with Davis. Roney’s quintet will be augmented by an orchestra that includes horns and—interestingly, considering the provenance of the piece—a turntablist.

THE STONE

Avenue C at 2nd St. (No phone)—July 23-28: The masterly U.S.-born saxophonist and clarinettist Michael Moore moved to Holland in the early eighties. Living overseas gave him the chance to work with forward-thinking European jazz ensembles, but it has kept him in the shadows here. He gets his chance in the spotlight during a week’s residency that features him with a different ensemble each night.

VILLAGE VANGUARD

178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. (212-255-4037)—July 23-28: The Fred Hersch trio, with Joe Lovano. When world-class players meet, the outcome is never a guarantee of success, but the pianist Hersch and the saxophonist Lovano are generous and sympathetic improvisers. Hersch’s exceptional trio mates—the bassist John Hebert and the drummer Eric McPherson—are sure to provide appropriate ballast.

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. |  “Legends of the Dead Ball Era (1900-1919) in the Collection of Jefferson R. Burdick.” Through Dec. 1. |  “Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969.” Through Jan. 26. (Open daily, 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. |  “Walker Evans American Photographs.” Through Jan. 26. |  “Rain Room.” Through July 28. |  “Projects 100: Akram Zaatari.” Through Sept. 23. (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. |  “David Hockney: The Jugglers.” Through Sept. 1. |  “Robert Irwin: Scrim Veil—Black Rectangle—Natural Light (1977).” Through Sept. 1. (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, 2001-2013.” Through Sept. 22. |  “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)—“Traylor in Motion: Wonders from New York Collections.” The American artist Bill Traylor, who was born into slavery in 1854, began making drawings at the age of eighty-five, when he was homeless and living in Montgomery, Alabama. Forty knockouts are exhibited here. Vigorous compositions—animals captured mid-leap, jaunty silhouettes of men and women—animate the page with sharp flashes of cobalt and scarlet. Traylor used whatever materials he could scare up, often scavenging discarded paper or cardboard. Asymmetrical proportions worked to his advantage, particularly when he expressed hard social truths: one image, on a triangular shard of cardboard, deftly captures the tension of a man with a cane, balancing on a fence as a ferocious dog barks beneath him. Through Sept. 22. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 7:30, and Sundays, noon to 6.)

DIA ART FOUNDATION AT THE FOREST HOUSES

Tinton Ave. between 163rd and 165th Sts., the Bronx (212-989-5566)—“Thomas Hirschhorn: Gramsci Monument.” Through Sept. 15. (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.)

MUSEO DEL BARRIO

Fifth Ave. at 104th St. (212-831-7272)—“El Museo’s Bienal 2013: Here Is Where We Jump.” This strong showing of works by thirty-seven artists, from newly minted M.F.A.s to those in mid-career, strikes a balance between formal rigor and conceptual provocation. Using an approach she calls “noise body,” the Brazilian artist Paula Garcia is seen in a videotaped performance wearing a magnetic suit as people cover her in layers of scrap metal, like a post-human Chris Burden. Ignacio González-Lang, from Puerto Rico, hired undocumented workers in Chinatown to make a Ku Klux Klan robe with embroidered sloganeering, a blunt call for immigrants’ rights. Works by a pair of young New Yorkers stand out: the energetic, street-smart drawings (and one painting) by Kenny Rivero and the provisional abstract sculptures of Gabriela Salazar, a poet of the in-between. Through Jan. 4. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 to 6, and Sundays, 1 to 5.)

NEUE GALERIE

1048 Fifth Ave., at 86th St. (212-628-6200)—“Koloman Moser: Designing Modern Vienna 1897-1907.” Through Sept. 2. (Open Thursdays through Mondays, 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.)

NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

170 Central Park W., at 77th St. (212-873-3400)—“Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York.” Through Sept. 1. |  “AIDS in New York: The First Five Years.” Through Sept. 15. (Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 to 6, Friday evenings until 8, and Sundays, 11 to 5.)

STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM

144 W. 125th St. (212-864-4500)—“Robert Pruitt: Women.” Through Oct. 27. |  “Things in Themselves: Steffani Jemison, Jennifer Packer, and Cullen Washington Jr.” Through Oct. 27. |  “Body Language.” Through Oct. 27. (Open Thursdays and Fridays, noon to 9, Saturdays, 10 to 6, and Sundays, noon to 6.)

GALLERIES—UPTOWN

PAUL MCCARTHY

An overwhelmingly perverse Gesamtkunstwerk by the Los Angeles performer and sculptor, sixty-seven, who has been merrily exposing the seamy underbelly of family-values-obsessed, consumer-driven culture for decades. There’s no wicked stepmother in his immersive reconstruction of “Snow White,” but the poison-apple tableau alone merits the show’s NC-17 rating, as does a crime scene that pays homage to Duchamp’s final masterpiece, “Étant Donnés.” Viewers wander below cartoonlike woods (a worm’s-eye view) and climb platforms to peer into windows of rooms, re-creations of those from McCarthy’s childhood home. The sets also served as backdrops in a seven-hour-long film, which appears throughout the show, on multiple screens. Snow, McCarthy’s twisted version of the Disney princess, does tequila shots with the dwarfs (in Ivy League sweatshirts), gets nasty with balloon dogs (to skewer Jeff Koons), and otherwise busies herself with a range of depravities. The artist casts himself in the role of the creator “Walt Paul.” Through Aug. 4. (Park Avenue Armory, Park Ave. at 66th St. 212-933-5812.)

“SNAPSHOT STORIES”

The collection of the Seattle-based businessman Robert E. Jackson has already been the subject of a substantial snapshot exhibition at the National Gallery and the basis for several books. This compact arrangement of found and anonymous works from the collection groups photographs into “stories” of between four and twenty-one images that are connected by author, subject, or motif. Pictures of a topless woman in a changing room, a man modelling his collection of bikini briefs, and random nudes give the show a playfully erotic undercurrent, but the longest sequence has a darker and more sinister cast that recalls Weegee’s crime scenes and Nicholas Ray’s film noir. Through Aug. 21. (Pace/MacGill, 32 E. 57th St. 212-759-7999.)

“WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS IN 1920S-1930S PARIS”

In Paris in the heady years between the world wars, women photographers took up key vanguard positions. Expats—Berenice Abbott, Florence Henri, Ilse Bing, and Germaine Krull among them—brought a genuine sophistication and a restless inventiveness to their pictures, as did their French contemporaries, including Claude Cahun and Dora Maar. Their work, seen here alongside that of more obscure figures, has lost none of its verve, charm, or, in the case of Rogi Andre’s study of the painter Chaim Soutine on his deathbed, peculiarity. Through Aug. 2. (Stephenson, 764 Madison Ave., at 66th St. 212-517-8700.)

Short List

JOHN BALDESSARI: Marian Goodman, 24 W. 57th St. 212-977-7160. Through Aug. 23. PAUL MCCARTHY: Hauser & Wirth, 32 E. 69th St. 212-794-4970. Through July 26. “40 EAST 14TH”: De Nagy, 724 Fifth Ave., at 57th St. 212-262-5050. Through Aug. 14. “MADE IN SPACE”: Venus Over Manhattan, 980 Madison Ave., at 76th St. 212-980-0700. Through Aug. 10.

GALLERIES—CHELSEA

CAROL BOVE

The final, four-block stretch of the High Line remains overgrown, with sweeping views of the Hudson to the west and the rail yards below. Seven gnomic sculptures by the marvellous New York artist complement rather than compete with the experience. Two white powder-coated-steel coils unfurl like laconic Slinkys. Three angular constructions made of rusty I-beams evoke railroad ties. A knee-high concrete block topped with a delicate brass framework suggests the work of a modernist Lilliputian. A large bronze plinth with a jade-green patina gracing one edge is a collaboration between the artist and entropy—it’s a watermark, evidence of damage sustained by the sculpture at Bove’s studio during Hurricane Sandy. Through May 31, 2014. (Admission is free, but reservations are required.) (Enter at W. 34th St. west of Eleventh Ave. 212-500-6035.)

SIMON FUJIWARA

Until he was born, in 1981, Fujiwara’s Japanese father and British mother ran a seaside hotel in Franco’s Spain. As a child in Cornwall, he trained as a classical pianist, then studied architecture before turning to art. Now Fujiwara divides his time between Berlin and Mexico City. Is it any wonder that his subject is the slippery nature of self? This compelling, if circuitous, video installation tracks his re-creation of a lost photograph he remembers seeing of his mother and an unidentified stranger, snapped on a beach in Beirut, where she worked as a cabaret dancer. In voice-over, the artist interviews himself about the project and interviews his actors about their lives. Roles are reversed, disappointments expressed, mysteries remain unresolved. Through Aug. 9. (Rosen, 525 W. 24th St. 212-627-6000.)

ROSALIND SOLOMON

When seventy-five pictures from the New York photographer’s series “Portraits in the Time of AIDS” were first shown, at the Grey Art Gallery, in 1988, their unsentimental directness upset a lot of people. There’s tenderness in the work, but it’s also unflinching and confrontational. Solomon brought viewers face to face with people dealing with AIDS—not only the infected but also their lovers, friends, families, and caregivers—at a time when terror and confusion nearly stifled sympathy. Twenty-five of the original black-and-white prints are exhibited here—extra-large, unframed, and pinned to the wall, as before. They’re historic now, and every bit as powerful and affecting as they were twenty-five years ago. Through Aug. 2. (Silverstein, 535 W. 24th St. 212-627-3930.)

Short List

RICCI ALBENDA: Kreps, 535 W. 22nd St. 212-741-8849. Through Aug. 9. FRANCIS CAPE: Murray Guy, 453 W. 17th St. 212-463-7372. Through Aug. 2. PAUL MCCARTHY: Hauser & Wirth, 511 W. 18th St. 212-790-3900. Through July 26. REGINA SILVEIRA: Gray, 508 W. 26th St. 212-399-2636. Through July 26. “HAIR AND SKIN”: Eller, 615 W. 27th St. 212-206-6411. Through Aug. 15. “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. “TEN YEARS”: Wallspace, 619 W. 27th St. 212-594-9478. Through Aug. 2.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Dance

FESTIVAL TBD: EMERGENCY GLITTER

From Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor, the organizer of the annual American Realness Festival, comes a new summertime event in experimental dance and performance. The inaugural program comprises eight works, plus barbecue discussions about sex, pop culture, and institutions. The artists include Burr Johnson, Niall Jones, Rebecca Warner, and Rebecca Patek. See abronsartscenter.org for complete schedule. (Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. 212-352-3101. July 24-28.)

LINCOLN CENTER OUT OF DOORS

The free performance series opens big with Mark Dendy’s “Ritual Cyclical” (see the Critic’s Notebook). Set to widely varying recordings by the Kronos Quartet, it features a cast of around eighty performers, including such compelling dancers as Michelle Boulé and K. J. Holmes. They play hipsters, operagoers, businesspeople, homeless people, members of the National Guard, and demigods of water, earth, and air, dancing among trees, in the reflecting pool, and on the tilted green to help connect city dwellers to something more primal. (Hearst Plaza, Lincoln Center. 212-721-6500. July 24-25 at 6.)

BALLET IN CINEMA / “PHARAOH’S DAUGHTER”

Amid the lurid power struggles, the Bolshoi soldiers on. This rebroadcast from last November features Petipa’s rarely seen Orientalist fantasy, set in the pyramids; it was his first big success, in 1862. After years of neglect by the Soviets, it was restored, based on motifs of the original, by the French ballet reconstructor Pierre Lacotte, who created this version in 2000. In the role of Aspicia, an Egyptian princess who rises from her sarcophagus to seduce a handsome British lord, Svetlana Zakharova oozes with exquisite iciness. The excellent Ruslan Skvortsov makes an impeccable nobleman transported, via opium dream, to the time of the pharaohs. The performance also features the captivating Nina Kaptsova as Ramze, Aspicia’s comely Nubian slave. See balletincinema.com for locations nationwide. (Big Cinemas, 239 E. 59th St. 212-371-6682. July 28 at 11 A.M. Chelsea Cinemas, 260 W. 23rd St. 212-691-5519. July 30 at 11 A.M.)

OUT OF TOWN

JACOB’S PILLOW

Michelle Dorrance, the tap-dance choreographer of the moment and this year’s winner of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, presents a new piece, “Blues Project,” at the Doris Duke Theatre. With the powerful folk musician Toshi Reagon leading a band playing her score and a cast combining Dorrance, who’s no slouch, with the astounding Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards and Derick K. Grant, the work offers history lessons about tap and the blues that should be anything but dry. | In its first U.S. appearance, the Israeli company L-E-V—founded by the dancer-choreographer Sharon Eyal and the techno-music producer Gai Behar—presents an evening-length work, “House,” at the Ted Shawn Theatre. True to Behar’s previous life as a producer of raves, the dancers move in a kind of trance state, writhing and grinding in flesh-colored unisex bodysuits. A mood of hyper-accentuated, but soulless, sexuality pervades. The performers’ eyes bear the dazed expressions that have become familiar from the work of another star on the Israeli scene, Ohad Naharin—not surprising, since Eyal worked with Naharin’s Batsheva Dance Company for several years. It’s a small world. (Becket, Mass. 413-243-0745. July 24-28.)

MOUNT TREMPER ARTS

This festival’s performance studio, tucked in the woods on the side of a mountain in the Catskills, would seem an ideal location for a solo titled “Another Tree Dance.” The artist is the unclassifiable Karinne Keithley Syers, and her work in progress is a meditation on Ralph Waldo Emerson, natural history, and open-endedness. (647 South Plank Rd., Mount Tremper, N.Y. 845-688-9893. July 27.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Classical

CONCERTS IN TOWN

INTERNATIONAL KEYBOARD INSTITUTE AND FESTIVAL

Jerome Rose’s summer celebration of the keyboard, which prompts a big huddle of pianists and piano fans to converge on Mannes College The New School for Music, is now fifteen years old. Two concerts are of special note: an evening with the wondrous Marc-André Hamelin that features sonatas by Haydn, Scriabin, and Schubert (in A Major, D. 959), and the final program, in which the grand romantic Jean-Efflam Bavouzet performs two Beethoven sonatas (the “Tempest” and the “Waldstein”) and Debussy’s Preludes, Book I. (150 W. 85th St. ikif.org. July 24 and July 27 at 8:30.)

“KRONOS AT 40”

Lincoln Center is using its Out of Doors series as a showcase for the Kronos Quartet, which, in its fortieth year, continues to stretch the boundaries of the string-quartet literature like no other group. Here are two highlights from five days of concerts full of premières, each presented at Damrosch Park. July 26 at 8:45: The first program emphasizes the Kronos’s global reach, featuring, among other pieces, two collaborative efforts. One is Magda Giannikou’s “Strophe in Antistrophe,” in which the composer joins the ensemble on the laterna, a hand-cranked street piano once popular in Greece; also included are two pieces by Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, who sits in with the Kronos on traditional Vietnamese instruments. | July 28 at 6:30: The quartet delves deeply into the American “post-classical” world, playing pieces by such young composer-performers as Bryce Dessner, Jherek Bischoff, and Dan Deacon. (No tickets required. For full schedule, see lcoutofdoors.org.)

MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL

New York’s favorite classical companion returns for another summer. July 27 at 7:30: In a free preview concert, Louis Langrée, the festival’s music director, leads the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra in two ever-appealing classics, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major. (Avery Fisher Hall. Tickets will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis beginning at 10 A.M.) | July 30-31 at 8: The official opening concert, also conducted by Langrée, features two guest soloists, each a master of style: the admired Met mezzo-soprano Alice Coote and the richly expressive French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. The program, bookended by Beethoven’s “Coriolan” Overture and the Seventh Symphony, also includes two Mozart arias and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major. (Avery Fisher Hall.) (212-721-6500.)

NAUMBURG ORCHESTRAL CONCERTS: THE KNIGHTS

The vibrant Brooklyn chamber orchestra makes a return visit to the Naumburg Bandshell. Nicholas Phan, a young tenor of the moment, joins the group in a centennial salute to Britten, singing the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings (with the hornist Michael P. Atkinson); also featured are works by J. S. Bach (the Concerto for Violin and Oboe), C. P. E. Bach, and Stravinsky (the Concerto in D) and a “Chaconne” composed collectively by the orchestra. (Mid-Park, south of 72nd St. July 30 at 7:30. No tickets required.)

OUT OF TOWN

TANGLEWOOD

Boston’s musical duchy offers a bevy of concerts this week; here are some highlights. July 24 at 8: An unusually interesting midweek concert features the Tanglewood début of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Conducted by Daniel Harding, with the poetic pianist Paul Lewis as soloist, the program includes Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, symphonies by Schumann and Sibelius (No. 7), and a work by the distinguished Australian composer Brett Dean. | July 27 at 8:30: In what is easily the highlight of the summer at Tanglewood, Andris Nelsons conducts his first concert as the newly appointed music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The repertory is appropriately momentous: Verdi’s Requiem, with the soloists including not only Nelsons’s glamorous wife, the Met soprano Kristīne Opolais, but the fellow-newcomers Lioba Braun and Dmytro Popov, and with the veteran bass Ferruccio Furlanetto and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus being their rock-solid selves. | July 28 at 2:30: In the second of two concerts conducted by the impassioned maestro Christoph Eschenbach, the B.S.O. spends some quality time with three of the classical catalogue’s old friends—Dvořák’s “Carnival Overture,” Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (with the mighty Garrick Ohlsson), and Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony. (Lenox, Mass. bso.org.)

CARAMOOR

Verdi’s relationship to the great operatic city of Paris has been the theme of Will Crutchfield’s bel-canto series this year. The Westchester festival bids the composer a bicentenary farewell with a touching program of his rarely performed songs for voice and piano, featuring several of Crutchfield’s Bel Canto Young Artists and introduced by the eminent Verdi scholar Philip Gossett. (Katonah, N.Y. 914-232-1252. July 25 at 6.)

GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

July 25 at 7:30 and July 29 at 1:30: This season’s most innovative production is a double bill on spiritual themes. The first act, directed by the company’s intendant, Francesca Zambello, is devoted to “The Little Match Girl Passion,” a deeply affecting work in which Hans Christian Andersen’s tender children’s story is seen through the lens of the Bach Passions, for which the composer David Lang justly won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008; David Moody conducts. After intermission comes a dramatization (directed and choreographed by Jessica Lang) of Pergolesi’s lovely and powerful “Stabat Mater,” sung by Nadine Sierra and the renowned Met countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo; Speranza Scappucci. | July 26 at 7:30: Glimmerglass honors the Verdi bicentennial by staging “King for a Day,” his second opera and his only comedy before “Falstaff.” It’s an uneven, early work, but it has plenty of charm, which will be brought out in an English-language production directed by Christian Räth, with Ginger Costa-Jackson, Jason Hardy, and Andrew Wilkowske in the leading roles; Joseph Colaneri. | July 27-28 at 1:30: Nathan Gunn, he of the firm baritone voice and the Pepsodent smile, is a natural when it comes to leading roles in great musicals. He plays Sir Lancelot in a production of Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot,” with Andriana Chuchman as Guenevere and David Pittsinger as King Arthur; James Lowe. | July 27 at 8 and July 30 at 1:30: Zambello also directs a new production of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” with Melody Moore, Jay Hunter Morris, Ryan McKinny, and Peter Volpe leading the cast; John Keenan. (Cooperstown, N.Y. 607-547-2255.)

BARD SUMMERSCAPE

With his Stravinsky festival still to come, Leon Botstein provides a prelude in the form of “Oresteia,” a towering opera by Sergey Taneyev, an honored fin-de-siècle composer and close colleague of Tchaikovsky, which was in the cultural mix in Stravinsky’s youth. A largely Slavic cast, backed by the American Symphony Orchestra, will take on the immortal roles in the work’s first full staging outside of Russia; Thaddeus Strassberger, long a favorite at Bard, directs. (Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. fishercenter.bard.edu. July 26 at 7 and July 28 at 3. Through Aug. 4.)

MAVERICK CONCERTS

In the highlight of the series’ centenary focus on Benjamin Britten, the Maverick welcomes a special guest, the Metropolitan Opera tenor Paul Appleby, for a performance of “Les Illuminations,” a glittering setting of verses by Rimbaud, which was composed during Britten’s summer sojourn in Woodstock, in 1939. Alexander Platt conducts a chamber orchestra that includes members of the Aurea Ensemble; the actors Chris Turner and Nigel Gore will read poetry by Auden, Spender, Isherwood, and Woolf, complementing a program that also includes Britten’s Three Divertimenti and his Rhapsody for Strings. The outstanding Escher String Quartet makes its Maverick début on the following afternoon, performing quartets by Elgar, Britten, Beethoven, and Harrison Birtwistle. (Woodstock, N.Y. maverickconcerts.org. July 27 at 6:30 and July 28 at 4.)

MARLBORO MUSIC

For sixty-two years, a group of the world’s finest instrumentalists, now headed by the pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode, have gathered in the Vermont countryside to study and perform the finest works in the chamber-music repertory with their very gifted protégés. Programs are announced one week in advance on marlboromusic.org. (Marlboro, Vt. July 27 at 8:30 and July 28 at 2:30.)

BRIDGEHAMPTON CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL

The flutist Marya Martin has been running this festival for thirty years, giving her audience a balance of classic and contemporary works in an atmosphere of relaxed elegance. Her first week winds up with a concert interleaving music by Bruce Adolphe (“Bridgehampton Concerto”) and Avner Dorman with Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 2, 4, and 5; the assisting musicians include the trumpeter Brandon Ridenour and the cellist Nicholas Canellakis. (Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church. July 28 at 6:30. For tickets and full schedule, see bcmf.org.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Movies

OPENINGS

BLUE JASMINE

Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening July 26. (In limited release.)

DRUG WAR

Johnnie To directed this crime drama, about a drug kingpin in China who secretly betrays his underlings. In Mandarin. Opening July 26. (In limited release.)

THE TO DO LIST

Aubrey Plaza stars in this comedy, as a high-school senior who wants to lose her virginity before college. Directed by Maggie Carey; co-starring Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Rachel Bilson, and Bill Hader. Opening July 26. (In wide release.)

THE WOLVERINE

A sequel in the “X-Men” series, starring Hugh Jackman in the title role, as a mutant who must battle a figure from his past. Directed by James Mangold; co-starring Famke Janssen. Opening July 26. (In wide release.)

NOW PLAYING

THE ACT OF KILLING

Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary is hard to describe and even more difficult to watch. Its backdrop is the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66, which targeted suspected Communists and the ethnic Chinese, and which claimed the lives of at least half a million people—many more, Oppenheimer would contend. The outrage remains poorly documented; the fact that many of the film’s Indonesian crew members are listed in the closing credits as “Anonymous” suggests that the wound in the national consciousness is unhealed. Not that the movie supplies much in the way of historical context, newly unearthed details, or archival footage; rather, Oppenheimer concentrates on a few perpetrators—elderly men, such as Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry, who committed countless crimes and have never faced justice. Here, they are invited to ponder and, if they choose, to restage some of their worst activities; we get song-and-dance sequences, bloody makeup, mock sessions of torture, and other peculiarities. To an extent, these have their desired effect: at the end, we see Congo consumed by the realization of what he did all those years ago. Unforgettable though such scenes may be, however, is it wise to weave such fantasies—however distressing or therapeutic—around the practice of evil when the facts of the case are, to most viewers, so obscure? Would we encourage a former Nazi, say, to dramatize his own wickedness in such extravagant fashion? It is to the movie’s credit that these and other questions crowd in with persistent force. In Indonesian.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 7/22/13.) (In limited release.)

BIG STAR: NOTHING CAN HURT ME

A true labor of love, this music documentary is about Memphis’s best-kept secret, the rock band Big Star (featuring Chris Bell and Alex Chilton, among others), who, in the early seventies, recorded three seminal albums that went nowhere but influenced a generation of musicians (including the Replacements and R.E.M.). A treasure trove of home movies and photographs allows the co-directors, Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori, to document the band’s coming together and falling apart and offer a passionate tribute to its brilliant, beautiful music. The film is by turns joyous and poignant (Bell died at the age of twenty-seven), and the filmmakers unfold with great care the band’s stuttering beginnings, their record company’s fumblings, and the group’s eventual rediscovery, in the mid-eighties, which brought the musicians some of the adulation they so richly deserved.—Bruce Diones (In limited release.)

CENTRO HISTÓRICO

Two of these four short films about the Portuguese city of Guimarães are by Portuguese directors, and they are standouts. Pedro Costa’s “Sweet Exorcist” features Ventura, the elderly Cape Verdean immigrant (and nonprofessional actor) who starred in his 2006 film, “Colossal Youth,” and extends the earlier film’s triangular connection between the life of a beleaguered laborer, the mighty grind of historical forces, and the substrate of mythological fantasy. Ventura wanders through haunted underbrush and arrives at a hospital, where, in an elevator, he encounters the statue of a soldier—with whom he enters into a dialogue about the country’s 1974 military coup, the vestigial dreams of his homeland, and the enduring legend of revolution that survives like a secular vision of redemption. The centenarian Manoel de Oliveira’s documentary-based fiction “The Conqueror, Conquered” takes an aptly long and Olympian view of history, following a tour guide (Ricardo Trêpa) as he leads his flock of tourists to the city’s medieval highlights and delivers potted introductions in broken English. Oliveira offers a simple and rarefied lesson in vision, finding blazingly clear angles to reveal ancient wonders in a renewed immediacy, to look ancient heroes in the face, and to take their point of view—visual and historical, whimsical yet hopeless—against the undiscerning modern crowd. In Portuguese and English.—Richard Brody (Anthology Film Archives; July 24-25.)

COMPUTER CHESS

This intimate dramatic masterwork of historical reconstruction, set around 1980, tells the story of quietly visionary programmers from around the country who wheel their jerry-rigged PCs to a nondescript hotel for a weekend-long tournament that pits their chess programs against one another. Along the way, the director, Andrew Bujalski, brings the designs and fashions of the time—and, even better, its moods and ideas—cleverly and joyfully back to life. He uses a period video camera to conjure the feel of archival footage (mainly washed-out black-and-white) and features onscreen videographers who document the event, from the opening panel discussion that sets out the intellectual stakes of the tournament to its poignant anticlimax. The drama arises from tensions between and within the programming teams (Bujalski sketches the involuted, awkward characters in brisk, subtle strokes) and, especially, from one computer that, endowed with a self-correcting mechanism by an ingenious professor, seems to prefer to play against humans and (as in “Alphaville”) exhibits a puckishly domineering philosophical temperament. An encounter group that’s booked into the hotel at the same time poses the mind-body problem in practical terms; allusions to Nikola Tesla’s theories, religious revivalism, and paranoid fantasies of military complicity capture modern abstractions in their fragile, critical early stages. The result is a sort of electronic Western, with its outpost of digital duellists laying the hands-on groundwork for the vast modern virtual realm and exposing, at the outset, its unresolved peculiarities.—R.B. (Film Forum.)

DESPICABLE ME 2

This is one of those rarities, an animated sequel that improves on the original. It does so by slimming down a bulky plot and accentuating the lively cartoon madness with Looney Tunes-style flair. The film again follows Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), a master criminal turned family man and father to three adopted girls—and their little pill-shaped minions—as they help a secret agent (Kristen Wiig) thwart an arch-villain. The directors, Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, and the screenwriters, Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul, have crafted a winning formula that folds snappy one-liners and inventive visual gags into a speedy, buoyant, inspired entertainment. The pitch-perfect voice cast includes Benjamin Bratt, Russell Brand, and Steve Coogan.—B.D. (In wide release.)

GLORIA

In John Cassavetes’s 1980 drama, the middle-aged, childless Gloria (Gena Rowlands) rescues the six-year-old Phil (John Adames) from the mobsters who have killed his family and goes on the lam with him and his father’s ledger of Mob accounts. Herself a big-time gangster’s ex-lover, she has a gun, knows how to use it, and doesn’t hesitate to shoot her pursuers in broad daylight—and their number keeps growing. The plot is a paranoid endgame in which the ubiquitous Mafia, in the know about everything before it happens, is the instrument of terminal destiny and running from death is as absurd as waiting for it. Cassavetes’s hard-nosed metaphysics is matched by the intimate ferocity of the odd couple; scenes of Phil’s proud, vain defiance and Gloria’s resentment could have been played, with the same dialogue, by Rowlands and an adult actor as the domestic combat of lovers. No other director married to his leading lady has ever filmed her face to such self-deprecating effect as did Cassavetes: the creases on Rowlands’s forehead and the crags beneath her eyes betray her hard years with him. The demanding man likens himself to the defenseless boy; both are saved by this gloriously burdened woman who would kill for them.—R.B. (BAM; July 24.)

THE HEAT

The fusion of a sentimental tale of friendship, a mismatched-cop buddy comedy, and a bloody crime story yields a very long movie; the many formulas never mesh, and some formidable actors stumble trying to keep pace with its out-of-synch meters. Sandra Bullock reprises her familiar shtick in the role of Sarah Ashburn, a nerdy, lonely, by-the-book F.B.I. agent; Melissa McCarthy plays Shannon Mullins, the raunchy, dishevelled, violent, street-smart cop with whom the straitlaced Sarah is forced to work on a mission to catch a psychopathic drug kingpin. The movie is smothered under a pile of clichés, not least those involving the raucous vulgarity of Boston’s white working class. McCarthy’s salty-tongued pugnacity seems routine, and her ribald edge is sheathed by the story’s homiletic drift about the importance of family and friends. A dance number that threatens to break out into joyful anarchy is quickly pushed back into the lockstep of plot, character, and message. The movie’s best joke is the work of the set decorator. With an earnest Demián Bichir, who wandered in from a meatier movie, as an agency higher-up. Directed by Paul Feig.—R.B. (In wide release.)

I’M SO EXCITED!

This could be the campiest movie that Pedro Almodóvar has ever made, which is saying something. Most of it takes place on an airplane, headed from Spain to Mexico but stuck in a holding pattern—surely a bad omen for any film—with everyone in coach fast asleep, like the residents of a spellbound castle. This leaves us with the pilots, the flight attendants, and the vexed travellers in business class; it’s like the closed set of a murder mystery, minus the crime. Almodóvar veterans like Cecilia Roth and Lola Dueñas give their all, subscribing without complaint to the law of desire, but the horsing around of the crew, whipped up by drink and drugs, feels tiresome and forced, and those who revere the director as a reliably suave master of ceremonies may look on in dismay and even disbelief. To throw caution to the winds is one thing, but to jettison control of tone at the same time seems a liberty too far. Still, there remain, as you would expect, passages of great finesse, not least during an emergency landing, and, if you really want to see grown men lip-synch to the Pointer Sisters, this is your film. With dispensable cameos for Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz. In Spanish.—A.L. (7/8 & 15/13) (In limited release.)

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

The South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s intricate comedy of broken romance, from 2012, reaches exquisite heights of self-mocking pathos, painterly finesse, and symbolic density. The story is framed by a young female screenwriter’s leap into a redemptive fantasy that involves three versions of a French woman—all played by Isabelle Huppert—who visits a somnolent Korean seaside resort. The inquisitively energetic foreigner interacts with two movie directors, a sexy lifeguard, a Buddhist monk, and others whose peace and quiet she troubles. Hong’s briskly assertive drypoint style of long takes and sharp zooms has never been more expansive in its view of riotous misunderstandings and erotic misadventures; he keeps his nested plots spinning whimsically, lending a delicate lilt even while infusing them with pain, jealousy, frustration, lust, and conflict. Meanwhile, the enticing landscape’s trees and shrubs, water and rocks burst into view with a tactile crispness, and obsessively repeated motifs evoke depths of psychological connection and mysteries of character that ring true even as they elude easy explanation. Lucidity and opacity, ordinary delights and exotic peculiarities blend breezily in an intimate jest of vast wonder. In English and Korean.—R.B. (Socrates Sculpture Park; July 24.)

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 film 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.—David Denby (In wide release.)

MIKEY AND NICKY

Nicky (John Cassavetes), a small-time gangster, is holed up in a Philadelphia flophouse, hiding from a contract hit. His lifelong friend and Mob companion, Mikey (Peter Falk), shows up to help him out—or to sell him out. In the course of their apocalyptic overnight ramble, the two men act out a lifetime of unresolved passions, from the death of parents to tense and blundering relations with wives and lovers to their own petty grievances and buried aggressions. Amazingly, this genre masterpiece, from 1976, was written and directed by the doyenne of loopy comedy, Elaine May, who made what is in effect a Cassavetes film, with its scarily intense and spontaneous performances, the better to expose the cruelty of Cassavetes-style male bravado, the ugliness of what his men do to women and what his women take from men. Cassavetes’s Nicky, with his perpetual sneering smile, spends the whole film scrambling in frantic terror and comic wrath, and Falk’s Mikey suffers savagely from his conflicting loyalties. The wild and unpredictable emotional swings render the inevitable conclusion all the more shattering, as the film lays bare the price of friendship and the gall of betrayal. In May’s view, it takes a real man to stop being one of the guys.—R.B. (BAM; July 30.)

ONLY GOD FORGIVES

Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn, the star and the director of “Drive,” team up once more, this time for a charming comedy of manners set in an English village, in springtime. Just kidding. In fact, we are in Bangkok, in the company of kickboxers, drug dealers, and killers without a conscience. Gosling plays Julian, who runs a club and speaks only when he needs to, if then. When his brother murders a teen-age girl, only to be killed in return, the boys’ mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), flies in to sort out the mess and exact revenge—the only moral activity that the film can be bothered to countenance. Violence is narcotic in such a world; it numbs rather than energizes people’s behavior, and it’s heightened by the lighting and the design that Refn so carefully engineers—he seems to view the city, and its weirdly sparse inhabitants, through red-tinted spectacles. Thank goodness for Scott Thomas, whose relish of an unlikely role lends the tale a pinch of comic spice. With the expressionless Vithaya Pansringarm, as a corrupt cop who wields a lethal sword and sings love songs in a karaoke bar. It’s hard to decide which habit is more offensive.—A.L. (7/22/13) (In limited release.)

PACIFIC RIM

A race of monsters, bereft of anger management, rises from the ocean floor and rips into civilization. In return, we build piloted robots, larger than skyscrapers and teeming with fancy weapons. Game on, and Guillermo del Toro’s thumping new movie has only just begun. It is punctuated by meetings between friend and foe—staged mostly after dark, sometimes under the sea, and graced with enormous gestures. Picking up a pair of buses and clapping them hard on the sides of your opponent’s head, with a view to crushing his skull: that counts as fair play, verging on chivalry, by the standards of this film. Racing around between the giant forms are various homunculi; Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi play a couple of pilots with the hots for each other, but it’s hard to pay them more than fitful attention. Even Idris Elba—a magisterial performer, as fans of “The Wire” can attest—struggles to make much impact here amid the relentless grandeur and the acres of bad dialogue. The film is memorable less for its emotional propulsion than for its geographical fidgets, leaping between superpowers and haunting the Far East, as if it were already scouting the markets that it plans to invade and conquer.—A.L. (7/22/13) (In wide release.)

THE WAY, WAY BACK

Once again, the oppressed American teen-ager lopes and shuffles to center stage, there to display his woes. (The radical choice would be to show him as blithely well adjusted, but that may be too much to ask.) In this case, the hero, Duncan (Liam James), age fourteen, accompanies his mother (Toni Collette) and her boyfriend (Steve Carell) on a summer trip to the coast of Massachusetts. He shrinks beneath the over-cheerful cries of the drinker next door (Allison Janney) and, to begin with, spurns the friendly overtures of her daughter (AnnaSophia Robb). Salvation arrives in the form of a local water park, shabby but welcoming, that’s run by a feckless, unbothered type (Sam Rockwell) who is even more of a kid than the kid is. The film, written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, idles along with some grace and catches more than a whiff of seaside pathos, but you find yourself waiting for the next life lesson to be handed out and wondering whether the adults—more seriously stranded than their offspring, in truth—should have been the focus of the movie’s tender concern.—A.L. (7/8 & 15/13) (In limited release.)

WORLD WAR Z

The first large-scale digital spectacle in years that’s likely to have some emotional meaning for grownups. It’s just a big zombie movie, but it stirs up fears of plague and anarchy and the sense that everything is constantly accelerating; at times, it has the tone and tempo of panic. The zombies attack with lightning speed; they gather and mount on top of one another by the thousand, climbing over walls and then pouring through the streets like running water. The best scenes in the movie have a jolting strangeness. With Brad Pitt, as a U.N. troubleshooter who has the modest task of saving the world; Mireille Enos, as his wife; Fana Mokoena, as a U.N. official who is apparently the only powerful man left on earth; and Daniella Kertesz, as an Israeli soldier (“Gut up,” Pitt instructs her, after amputating her arm). Directed by Marc Forster; written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, and Damon Lindelof.—D.D. (7/1/13) (In wide release.)

ALSO PLAYING

BLACKFISH: In limited release. THE CONJURING: In wide release. GIRL MOST LIKELY: In limited release. R.I.P.D.: 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. July 24-25 at 7:15 and 9: “Centro Histórico” (+). | July 29 at 7:30: Short films by Jem Cohen, Program 1. | July 30 at 7:30: Short films by Jem Cohen, Program 2.

BAM CINÉMATEK

30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100)—The films of John Cassavetes. July 24 at 4:30, 7, and 9:30: “Gloria” (+). | July 25 at 7 and 9:30: “The Fury” (1978, Brian De Palma). | July 29 at 4:30, 7, and 9:30: “Big Trouble” (1986). | July 30 at 4:30, 7, and 9:30: “Mikey and Nicky” (+). | “Big Screen Epics.” July 24 at 7:30: “The Godfather” (1972, Francis Ford Coppola). | July 25 at 7:30: “The Godfather: Part II” (1974, Coppola).

FILM FORUM

W. Houston St. west of Sixth Ave. (212-727-8110)—In revival. July 24-25 at 1:30, 4:20, 7, and 9:35: “L’Avventura” (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni; in Italian). | July 26-Aug. 1 at 1, 3:10, 5:20, 7:30, and 9:40: “The Servant” (1963, Joseph Losey).

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER

Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610)—“Double Feature.” July 24 at 7:30: “Drive, He Said” (1970, Jack Nicholson) and “Goin’ South” (1978, Nicholson). | “Art of the Real.” July 25 at 6: “Shadows from My Past” (2012, Curt Kaufman and Gita Weinrauch Kaufman). | “Indie Night.” July 25 at 8:30: “Exit Elena” (2012, Nathan Silver), introduced by the director and cast members. | “An Evening with Paul Schrader.” July 29 at 7: Première screening of “The Canyons” (2013, Schrader), introduced by the director.

FRENCH INSTITUTE ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE

55 E. 59th St. (212-355-6160)—Highlights of the Cannes Film Festival. July 30 at 12:30, 4, and 7:30: “Pickpocket” (1959, Robert Bresson).

IFC CENTER

323 Sixth Ave., at W. 3rd St. (212-924-7771)—In revival. July 24-30 (call for showtimes): “Escape from New York” (1981, John Carpenter).

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Roy and Niuta Titus Theatres, 11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9480)—“An Auteurist History of Film.” July 24-26 at 1:30: “Shoot the Piano Player” (1960, François Truffaut) and “Happy Anniversary” (1962, Pierre Étaix and Jean-Claude Carrière).

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077)—“See It Big: The American Epic.” July 27 at 2: “Nashville” (1975, Robert Altman). | July 27 at 5:30 and July 28 at 1: “There Will Be Blood” (2007, Paul Thomas Anderson). | July 28 at 4:30: “The Night of the Hunter” (1955, Charles Laughton).

SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK

32-01 Vernon Blvd., at Broadway, Long Island City (718-956-1819)—Through Aug. 21: “Outdoor Cinema.” July 24 at sunset: “In Another Country” (+). Pre-screening performances begin at 7.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Readings and Talks

COMMUNITY BOOKSTORE

David Gilbert discusses his new novel, “& Sons,” with David Ebershoff, his editor. (143 Seventh Ave., Park Slope, Brooklyn. 718-783-3075. July 25 at 7.)

THE POWERHOUSE ARENA

Ben Sargent, the host of the Cooking Channel show “Hook, Line, and Dinner” and the man behind Brooklyn’s Underground Lobster Pound, marks the publication of his new book, “The Catch: Sea-to-Table Recipes, Stories & Secrets,” by talking with the food writer Peter Kaminsky. (37 Main St., at Water St., Brooklyn. 718-666-3049. July 30 at 7.)

HOUSING WORKS BOOKSTORE CAFÉ

The pianist and composer Timo Andres celebrates the release of a new album, “Home Stretch,” by joining the artist and book designer Peter Mendelsund and Leo Carey, an editor at this magazine, for a discussion. Andres will also perform. (126 Crosby St. 212-334-3324. July 30 at 7.)

GREENLIGHT BOOKSTORE

Susan Choi, the author of “A Person of Interest,” reads from her new novel, “My Education.” (686 Fulton St., at S. Portland Ave., Brooklyn 718-246-0200. July 30 at 7:30.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Above and Beyond

BAT WALK

Wave Hill invites adults (and accompanied children over the age of ten) to stroll the garden at dusk, keeping an eye out for bats with the naturalist Paul Keim, a.k.a. the Batman of Brooklyn, and the help of an echo locator. (W. 249th St. at Independence Ave., the Bronx. 718-549-3200. July 24 and Aug. 14, from 7:30 to 9. To reserve space, call 718-549-3200, ext. 305.)

“EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH”

For this monthly talk show, Catie Lazarus interviews accomplished people who have landed their dream jobs. The nights are not quite “What Color Is Your Parachute?” material, however, because Lazarus is a writer and a comedian, and although her subjects are extremely notable—past guests have included Rachel Maddow, Gloria Steinem, Reggie Watts, and The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff—her line of inquiry can be decidedly unorthodox; one time she made Steinem tap-dance. The next show is on July 25 at 8, and it features four women over forty: Janeane Garofalo, Stacy London, Joy Behar, and Emily Nussbaum, the TV critic for this magazine. There will also be music from the house band, the New Guys, and drinks will be served. (Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre East, 153 E. 3rd St. 212-366-9231.)

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
On the Horizon

DANCE

BREAK IT DOWN

July 31

When break dancing was big, in the eighties, the Rock Steady Crew was out front. The only member from that time who’s still performing is Richard (Crazy Legs) Colón, the group’s leader. This free show at Central Park SummerStage will be his last. (212-360-2777.)

THE THEATRE

DEATH BECOMES HER

Aug. 5-17

The playwright and performer Young Jean Lee has released a new album, “We’re Gonna Die,” in tandem with a return engagement, at LCT3’s Claire Tow Theatre, of her show of the same title, which premièred in 2011, at Joe’s Pub. In it, Lee combines stories about the brutality and the beauty of life, and sings with her pop band, Future Wife. (212-239-6200.)

NIGHT LIFE

IT AIN’T ME, BABE

Aug. 6-16

The summer Antifolk Festival, at the Sidewalk Café, in the East Village, cools the dog days of August with shows full of heartfelt singing and honest songwriting. Highlights include the smoky-voiced troubadour Dave Deporis, the xylophone punks Crazy & the Brains, and the barbed-tongue performing veteran Hamell on Trial. (sidewalkny.com.)

MOVIES

FOX AND FRIENDS

Aug. 9-15

Film Society of Lincoln Center resumes its tribute to Twentieth Century Fox—now seventy-seven years old—with some of the studio’s classics, both urban and rural, including Jerry Schatzberg’s “The Panic in Needle Park,” starring Al Pacino and Kitty Winn as West Side heroin addicts, and John Ford’s “My Darling Clementine,” with Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp. (212-875-5610.)

ART

CECI N’EST PAS

Sept. 28-Jan. 12

René Magritte painted images so strangely indelible that now they can seem to verge on the cliché. MOMA refreshes our take on the Belgian Surrealist, surveying his breakthrough years in the exhibition “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938.” (212-708-9400.)

CONTRIBUTORS
Contributors

Jelani Cobb (Comment) directs the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut. His most recent book is “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.”

Jeffrey Toobin (The Talk of the Town) is a staff writer and the author of “The Oath,” which came out in paperback in June.

Patricia Marx (“Mentally Fit”) writes for film and television. “Starting from Happy,” her latest novel, is available in paperback.

John Hodgman (Shouts & Murmurs) appears on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and in his own one-man show, “Ragnarok,” which premièred on Netflix in June.

Alex Ross (“Othello’s Daughter”), the magazine’s music critic and the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and “Listen to This,” is working on a new book, “Wagnerism.”

Elizabeth Bradfield (Poem) is the author of the poetry collections “Approaching Ice” and “Interpretive Work.” She teaches at Brandeis University and at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, and lives on Cape Cod.

Atul Gawande (“Slow Ideas”), a surgeon and a staff writer, is the director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health-system innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health. “The Checklist Manifesto” is his most recent book.

Bill Buford (“Cooking with Daniel”) spent the past five years in Lyons with his family, learning to be a French cook. He is working on a book about his time there.

Dariusz Sośnicki (Poem) is a Polish poet and editor. A collection of his poems, translated into English, will be published in 2014.

Daniel Alarcón (Fiction) will publish his second novel, “At Night We Walk in Circles,” in October.

Emily Nussbaum (On Television) is the magazine’s television critic.

Adam Gopnik (Books), a staff writer, received the 2012 I.A.C.P. Award for literary food writing for his book “The Table Comes First,” which is available in paperback.

Lorenzo Mattotti (Cover) is a regular contributor to the magazine. “Works” is a recent anthology of his illustrations.

THE MAIL
BALLOT BLOCKS

A letter in response to Louis Menand’s article (July 8 & 15, 2013)

Louis Menand’s otherwise excellent piece on the history of the Voting Rights Act perpetuates the pervasive myth that the non-Southern jurisdictions covered by Section Five of the Voting Rights Act are “anomalies” (A Critic at Large, July 8th & 15th). Alaska’s inclusion is due not merely to low turnout on account of inclement weather, as Menand suggests, but also to the state’s history of disenfranchising its vast Native American population. Similarly, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx were covered because of a New York State English-language literacy test that disenfranchised tens of thousands of Puerto Rico-born voters in those boroughs prior to the passage of the V.R.A. In the light of the Supreme Court’s recent invalidation of the Section Five coverage formula as well as racially motivated voter-suppression efforts in the 2012 election in Northern states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, it is more important than ever to acknowledge the less horrific but no less real history of voter suppression above the Mason-Dixon line, and to renew efforts to secure voting rights nationwide.

Daniel Brook

New Orleans, La.

THE MAIL
BALLOT BLOCKS

A letter in response to Louis Menand’s article (July 8 & 15, 2013)

Menand writes that the era of Jim Crow began with states erecting obstacles to voting and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that upheld laws designed to disenfranchise African-Americans. In Mississippi v. Williams, in 1898, the defendant, an African-American from Mississippi, was indicted for murder by an all-white grand jury and convicted by an all-white petit jury. Williams was sentenced to death by hanging, prompting his appeal. He argued that Mississippi violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by excluding African-Americans from jury service. The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, ruled that the possibility of discrimination was not a sufficient ground for invalidating the disputed provisions in Mississippi law which effectively disenfranchised African-Americans. Shamefully, the practice of “purging” entire segments of the population from jury service, on the basis of voter disenfranchisement or other factors, lasted well into the twentieth century. In Batson v. Kentucky, in 1986, the Supreme Court held that, under the Equal Protection Clause, race could not be used by the state in criminal cases as a basis for striking jurors without cause, and, in 2010, in Berghuis v. Smith, that it was necessary to provide sufficient evidence to prove that a trial court’s policies had systematically under-represented African-American jurors. As these recent cases show, Menand is perfectly correct in noting that race remains an issue in the U.S. judicial system.

François van der Mensbrugghe

Professor, Law School of the University of Saint-Louis and University of Liège

Brussels, Belgium

THE MAIL
BALLOT BLOCKS

A letter in response to Louis Menand’s article (July 8 & 15, 2013)

In Menand’s overview of the classical phase of the civil-rights movement, he mentions the documentary “Eyes on the Prize,” calling the series a “terrific resource for those sights and sounds, as well as for its interviews with participants.” In the first video, Martin Luther King, Jr., is interviewed shortly after his home in Montgomery was bombed, in late January, 1956, when the bus boycott was still in its early days. He is asked if he is scared. There is a pause before he answers, surprisingly, “No.” I have always considered this moment pivotal: King appears to be accepting the lot that circumstance and history have cast upon him. Menand reminds us that there were many heroes of the movement, but that King remains the chief spokesperson for those times.

Margaret Earley Whitt

Professor Emerita of English, University of Denver

Denver, Colo.