Feed

Sarah Hucal

By Alex Fankuchen 4/17 5:27pm

books

'Farther Away.' (Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Between Novels: Jonathan Franzen’s Essays Meditate on Birdwatching, Solitude, Mourning

In his 2008 essay “The Chinese Puffin,” reprinted in his second essay collection, Farther Away (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $26.00), Jonathan Franzen contemplates the apparently limitless carpet of lights unfurling from the center of Shanghai, and asks, “Does anybody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?” In a rare moment in these essays, he answers “yes,” but is unwilling to drag us there. In fact, steering clear of the really deep shit—certain kinds of hard truths—is Mr. Franzen’s m.o. throughout this collection. Read More

By Hannah Gersen 3/13 6:03pm

books

sdfsdsfsdf

Life After ‘Monsters’: Lauren Groff’s Latest Novel, Arcadia, Takes Place in a Utopian Commune

Three-year-old Beckett Kallman has just figured out that his mother, Lauren Groff, writes books for a living.

“It’s a very strange feeling for him,” Ms. Groff said, in a telephone interview from her home in Gainesville, Fla. “When I put him to bed, he asks, ‘Can I read one of your books?’ And I say, ‘Not yet.’”

Undoubtedly, it will be even stranger for Beckett when he discovers that his mother’s second novel, Arcadia (Voice, 304 pages, $25.99), the story of a boy growing up in a Utopian commune, is dedicated to him. And perhaps even stranger when he learns that the little boy in question was inspired by his birth. Read More

By Michael Robbins 3/13 5:52pm

books

dsfsdds

Keeping Faith: In ‘When I Was a Child I Read Books,’ Marilynne Robinson Criticizes American Politics

Marilynne Robinson is not amused. “We now live,” she writes at the outset of her new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $26.00), “in a political environment characterized by wolfishness and filled with blather.” One of our political parties has descended into outright lunacy while the other responds to widespread financial calamity by proposing lower corporate tax rates. In that passage, Ms. Robinson invokes Walt Whitman, to remind us that the country has been here before, or at least found itself in circumstances equally dire, but also to confront the self-appointed defenders of “traditional values” with the actual spirit of our best traditions:

It is not unusual now to hear that we have lost our values, that we have lost our way. In the desperations of the moment, justified or not, certain among us have turned on our heritage, the country that has emerged out of generations of attention to public education, public health, public safety, access to suffrage, equality under law. It turns out, by their reckoning, that the country they call the greatest on earth has spent most of its history acting against its own (great) nature, and that the enhancements of life it has provided for the generality of its people, or to phrase it more democratically, that the people have provided for themselves, have made its citizens weak and dependent. Read More

By James Miller 3/06 4:32pm

books

(Photo by Michael Lionstar)

The Others: Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men Has UFOs, Peace and Love, Drugs and Despair, Indian Legends and Derivative Trading Systems

At the start of Hari Kunzru’s sprawling and ambitious fourth novel, Gods Without Men (Knopf, 374 pages, $26.95), we are introduced to an aircraft engineer called Schmidt, a man obsessed with how to “connect the mysteries of technology with those of the spirit.” Taking refuge in the desert, Schmidt builds an airstrip in order to “summon the only force powerful enough to transcend communism and capitalism.” This force is not political but extraterrestrial and it doesn’t take long before a UFO lands at his amateur airport. Mr. Kunzru describes first contact between Schmidt and the extraterrestrials rather like a colonial encounter between glittering conquistadors and awe-struck, adoring natives. These Aryan aliens, all “blond hair,” translucently pale skin and “noble faces,” seem to transport Schmidt into a world of light. From this point, Gods Without Men jumps backward and forward from 1775 to the present and features (among other things) psychedelic reworkings of the Indian coyote myth, a disappearing child and a simulacrum of the war in Iraq. Unifying these disparate events are “the three pinnacles,” an unusual rock formation that acts as the organizing symbol of the novel, drawing together a compelling aggregate of dysfunctional characters and clashing belief systems. Read More

By Sarah Hucal 12/16/11 4:12pm

Classical Music

Josh Bell (Photo courtesy of Chris Lee)

Violin Virtuoso Josh Bell Sparkles in Philharmonic's Pagan Program

When Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in May of 1913, its thorny polyrhythms and pagan-inspired choreography completely unnerved the audience, whose booing and catcalls eventually erupted into a full-blown riot. Even after the police intervened, chaos reigned for the remainder of the performance as bar-room-style brawls broke out in the Parisian aisles, sending the evening into the annals of music history. Read More

By Sarah Hucal 12/15/11 2:16pm

Opera

La Boheme image

La Bohème at the Met

It was the evening after Christmas in 1900 when the Metropolitan Opera Company, on tour in Los Angeles, premiered La Bohème. It was years before Giacomo Puccini’s opera became widely acknowledged as the masterpiece it is, and, just four years old at the time, it was by no means an immediate success, still requiring the star power of soprano Nellie Melba. Ms. Melba, encouraged by the applause, as well as the box office, would return after the final curtain call to sing the grueling “Mad Scene” from Lucia di Lammermoore. These days, La Bohème remains one of the only operas that doesn’t require such gimmicks to keep the house full, as proved by its triumphant return to the Met this fall. Read More

By James Camp 12/13/11 5:33pm

books

TK

The Good Wife: Ann Beattie’s Imagined Life of Pat Nixon Is as Much About Its Author as It Is About Its Subject

Has there ever been a blander public figure than the wife of Richard Nixon? She was Thelma Catherine Ryan at birth, Babe in the Morn to her dad, Mrs. Nixon to her husband and the British Queen; but she is remembered, if at all, as Pat, the woman who stood by Tricky Dick. She was a lover of far-flung plane trips, who wore her hair in a globelike, reddish-blond bouffant, and a diffident celebrity, whose lapses were rare but telling. In 1968, while “Dick” was running for president, she appeared on television with Bud Wilkinson and Paul Keyes. At one point, the audience, cued by a prompter, applauded an answer she had given to one of Wilkinson’s questions. Mrs. Nixon applauded along with them. “She then made a second mistake when she realized what she’d done wrong,” recalls Ann Beattie in her strange new novel, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (Scribner, 304 pages, $26.00), “and put her hands over her eyes.” It is emblematic of the many ironies of Pat Nixon’s life that she should have illustrated the limits of self-effacement on national television. Read More

By Sarah Hucal 12/12/11 3:46pm

Battle of the Skyscrapers

Brooklyn builds big. (SLCE)

Let the Skyline Saga Begin: Brooklyn Battles Over Its Tallest Building

For nearly a century, the 37-story Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower dominated the Brooklyn skyline, it’s 512 feet earning it the title of Brooklyn’s tallest building. Now, after memories of the recession have faded into the real estate abyss, ambitious developers are back in the game, ready to make their childhood Guinness Book of World’s Records dreams come true. Get ready for the Battle of the Buildings as next year, not one, but two Brooklyn developers plan to break ground on Brooklyn’s tallest skyscrapers, according to The Journal. Read More

By Sarah Hucal 12/08/11 11:02am

Food for Thought

Food for thought

Your Neighborhood Produce Pushers: MTA Art for Transit Grows Local

Locally grown produce is not what one typically associates with the Atlantic Avenue subway station—the mall food court upstairs is anything but, and the victuals across the street at the Brooklyn Flea is really just fast food for hipsters. Crack pie, anyone?

However, a new photography exhibit by Brooklyn-based photographer Valery Rizzo on display now until December 2012, will decorate the subway walls with vibrant images of mouthwatering legumes, radishes and cucumbers, likely to inspire guilt about Shake Shake cravings and understocked refrigerators. Read More

By Sarah Hucal 12/02/11 10:48am

Classical Music

Ian Bostridge and Thomas Ades take on Carnegie Hall (Photo: Chris Lee)

The Dark Side of His Tune: Tenor Ian Bostridge at Carnegie Hall

On Monday night in Carnegie Hall’s Stern auditorium, audience members seemed to scan the empty stage for signs of life as they anxiously awaited tonight’s performers, British tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Thomas Adès. It was already ten minutes past 8:00 p.m. and we had yet to see as much as a tuxedo coattail wave from behind the stage door. The lights dimmed briefly before springing back to full strength in what was either an attempt to settle the fidgeting audience, or the accidental slip of a techie’s elbow. We couldn’t be sure.

Eventually, the lanky Mr. Bostridge drifted across the stage, briefly smiling at the audience before taking his place in the crook of the piano. Standing well over six-feet and graced with a boyish features, Mr. Bostridge appears as a teen in the midst of an awkward growth-spurt. He cued Mr. Adès with a smile, who began the first selection, John Dowland’s Elizabethan “In Darkness Let Me Dwell,” a dirge-like piece with a celebrity following – Sting has covered it – that set a a somber tone for the remainder of the recital, which featured an abundance of melancholic Heinrich Heine poetry. Centering around themes of depression, alienation from society, and unrequited love, the composers featured in the evening’s performance ranged from the lesser-known György Kurtág, to leaders in Lieder Schumann, Schubert and Liszt. Read More