- Rebecca Mead: Tasmania’s first lady takes a goodwill tour.
Larissa Bartlett, the First Lady of Tasmania, was in New York last week, on a mission to enhance American awareness of her island—a mission that, it might reasonably be thought, can only have a positive outcome. Tasmania’s profile has nowhere to go but up. To the . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: You’ve Got Mail
Moral-reasoning pop quiz: There’s a film coming out—a thinly disguised portrayal of a media mogul—and word is that if it’s released it will hurt the mogul’s reputation. Powerful people intervene: they call a meeting and offer the movie studio . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Scott Stringer, Scarlett Johansson, and New York’s mayoral race.
One of the many collateral effects of Anthony Weiner’s political demise—besides immortalizing the direct-messaging function on Twitter—was to blow open the race to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York City. Officially, campaigning won’t start for at least another year . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: How top chefs fly with their knives.
Here’s a travel story that will send you back: Some years ago, Eric Ripert, the executive chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, was returning to New York from Washington, D.C., where he’d cooked for a charity event. He put his carry-on bag through the . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Van Cleef & Arpels diamonds on display.
Paris, France, sometime in the nineteen-fifties. A woman walks into Van Cleef & Arpels and falls in love with a diamond necklace. It’s expensive—say, four hundred thousand francs. “Listen,” she tells the jeweller, “tomorrow I’m going to come with my . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Defending the accused after a giant Mob bust.
It’s a common refrain, among the city’s armchair criminologists, that the Mob is dead in New York. So last Thursday’s giant federal Mob bust—a hundred and twenty-seven people, encompassing seven crime families—elicited a special fascination. It seemed almost nostalgic . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Defending the accused after a giant Mob bust.
It’s a common refrain, among the city’s armchair criminologists, that the Mob is dead in New York. So last Thursday’s giant federal Mob bust—a hundred and twenty-seven people, encompassing seven crime families—elicited a special fascination. It seemed almost nostalgic . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Classical Music
ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES
NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC
Susan Graham is the orchestra’s special guest in a program that spotlights three geniuses of French Romanticism—that is, before Debussy and Ravel made France’s music more irreducibly Gallic than ever before. Andrew Davis conducts Berlioz’s . . ....
- Joan Acocella: Sets from Balanchine, at the Drawing Center.
Balanchine didn’t care much about the visual arts. There’s a story that Lincoln Kirstein, who founded New York City Ballet with him, once invited him to go to a museum. “No thanks,” Balanchine said. “I’ve been to a museum.” Today . . ....
- Hilton Als: Lady Bunny in “That Ain’t No Lady!,” at Escuelita.
In 1985, a performer named Lady Bunny founded Wigstock, in New York’s Tompkins Square Park, and the dream was this: drag artists like Bunny and RuPaul (then relatively unknown) would share the stage with fabulous pop stars such as Deee-Lite and Deborah Harry to promote wigs, glitter . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Ben Walker plays Andrew Jackson in eyeliner.
The high-camp American-history rock musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” has been extended through June at the Public Theatre—good news for the packs of teen-age girls who can be seen hovering outside the lobby. They’re not all students of nineteenth-century populism . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Caffè Storico at the New-York Historical Society review.
paragraph class="noindent">A serious restaurant in a museum: what a good concept. Pioneered by MOMA, with the Modern, and spreading, with varying degrees of success, to the Whitney (Untitled), the Guggenheim (the Wright), and the Museum of Arts and Design (Robert), the formula, if executed well, can . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Mitt Romney’s psychic reading.
Mitt Romney’s victories in Wisconsin, Maryland, and D.C. last week lent the primaries a new statistical fervor. Pundits who’d been talking about mood and narrative switched to hard numbers—delegates, probabilities. Useful, but it was enough to make the mind crave a more metaphysical reading . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Roberta’s, in Brooklyn.
paragraph class="noindent">This gourmet pizza place, located amid a desolate-looking stretch of warehouses in Bushwick, is often described as a D.I.Y. enterprise. The label is slightly ambiguous—aren’t a lot of other restaurant entrepreneurs doing it themselves, too? Carlo Mirarchi, the chef at Roberta’ . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Bohemian, in NoHo.
paragraph class="noindent">New York does exclusivity well, but Tokyo does it better. There is a Japanese phrase, “Ichigensama okotowari,” that’s used by owners of certain discriminating restaurants and shops, and means, roughly, “We respectfully decline first-time visitors.” In other words: walk-ins . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Bohemian, in NoHo.
paragraph class="noindent">New York does exclusivity well, but Tokyo does it better. There is a Japanese phrase, “Ichigensama okotowari,” that’s used by owners of certain discriminating restaurants and shops, and means, roughly, “We respectfully decline first-time visitors.” In other words: walk-ins . . ....
- Hilton Als: Joe Cino honored at the N.Y.P.L. for the Performing Arts.
The theatrical pioneer Joe Cino wasn’t interested in the mundane. The operatic highs and lows of his life weren’t separate from his great creation: a café that’s largely credited with establishing New York’s Off-Off Broadway theatre scene. He called it . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: New York rallies for Haiti.
One of the effects that the earthquake in Haiti has produced in New York is the unfamiliar feeling of total geographic irrelevance: for the first few days, when damaged roads and ruined cell-phone towers made the island impenetrable, New York City seemed like a helpless, remote archipelago. And yet . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Michael’s
paragraph class="noindent">New York is rich in culture, cuisine, and commerce. The suburbs have parking spots and fast food, and they also have Michael’s, the largest arts-and-crafts supply chain in North America. But as of October, New York became the first metropolis in the Northeast . . ....
- Philip Gourevitch: Nicolas Sarkozy’s politics and promises.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, doesn’t like wine. He doesn’t like smelly cheeses. He doesn’t like truffles. He likes Diet Coke and candy and big Havana cigars. Such distaste for good taste is widely regarded as unnatural in France, but Sarkozy makes no . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Gwyneth Paltrow, from movie star to domestic goddess.
It’s tough for some people to accept Gwyneth Paltrow’s transformation from movie star to domestic goddess. Something about the combination of her willowy looks, her glam life style (she is married to Chris Martin, the Coldplay front man), and the unlikely food tips in her e . . ....
- The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculpture from the Court of Burgundy @ Metropolitan Museum
A renovation at the Musée des Beaux Arts de Dijon, in Burgundy, means a New York vacation for these fifteenth-century statuettes. Approximately sixteen inches high and carved in alabaster, they portray a procession of Carthusian monks, choirboys, and clergy mourning the loss of John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy, and his wife, Margaret of Bavaria. (The backstory: John had his...
- Kelefa Sanneh: Protesting the mixed-martial-arts ban in New York
Fifteen years ago, Governor George Pataki signed a law that banned exhibitions of “combative sport” in New York. Boxing was specifically excluded from the ban. So was wrestling. Also judo, Tae Kwon Do, and karate. The law’s real target was ultimate fighting, a martial-arts hybrid . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Printable Cards – Does Snail Mail Have Rewards?
There is nothing more exciting than receiving an interesting and unusual envelope in the post with your name written on it, what a thrill it is to receive such a novel, original post addressed to you.
In the world today, postal mail received is generally bills, insurance and advertising, very little post received is of any significant interest....
- New York Philarmonic Stravinsky Festival: Program VII @ Avery Fisher Hall—New York Philharmonic
The last week of Valery Gergiev’s essential survey of the composer’s music mixes four lean and elegant neoclassical works with two ballet bombshells from before the First World War. The guest artist for the first program is the débutant Denis Matsuev, every inch the powerhouse Russian pianist, who performs the charming Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, a sly evocation...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Matador tailor Justo Algaba and the Metropolitan Opera’s “Carmen.”
Justo Algaba, one of the world’s most respected matador tailors, was in town the other day from Madrid, where he has a two-story shop devoted to the production of matador outfits, called trajes de luce (“suits of light”), because of their shimmery, multicolored adornments. Algaba . . ....
- Sasha Frere-Jones: Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, the women of pop.
Three women run the pop world right now. Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” Beyoncé’s “4,” and Adele’s “21” split the market into neat thirds without too much conceptual jostling. Adele’s impeccably sung collection of unperturbing . . ....
- Peter Stevenson: Lady Antonia Fraser remembers Harold Pinter.
One morning last month, Lady Antonia Fraser was stuck in a security line at the Toronto Airport and missed her plane. She didn’t mind, because she had a Kindle and spent the time reading a novel. When the next flight got her safely to New York, she checked . . ....
