- Goings On About Town: Venues: Madison Square Park
Madison Ave. at 25th St., New York, N.Y. 10010madisonsquarepark.org...
- Books: “The Chairs Are Where the People Go.”
After Heti decided that “the world should have a book of everything” that Glouberman knows, the two friends drafted a list of promising topics. Then Glouberman, a well-known performance artist, talked, Heti transcribed, and the result is a triumph of what might be called conversational philosophy. Heti . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Sasha Frere-Jones: Black Keys and Arctic Monkeys, at Madison Square Garden.
If you were baffled by the Grammys’ recent take on rock music (as they have it, apparently, the only band working in the genre is Foo Fighters), then one show will quickly clarify matters. On March 12, at Madison Square Garden, England’s Arctic Monkeys are opening for . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Tad Friend: John Logan’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus.”
In a basement conference room at Bauman Rare Books, on Madison Avenue, two men sat near a bust of Tolstoy. They wore matching bibliophile regalia—gray sweater and spectacles—but while Erik DuRon, the store’s manager, maintained a dignified slouch, John Logan, the playwright and screenwriter . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Tad Friend: John Logan’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus.”
In a basement conference room at Bauman Rare Books, on Madison Avenue, two men sat near a bust of Tolstoy. They wore matching bibliophile regalia—gray sweater and spectacles—but while Erik DuRon, the store’s manager, maintained a dignified slouch, John Logan, the playwright and screenwriter . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ed Pashke @ Gagosian—980 Madison Ave.
A museum-quality retrospective salutes the late Chicago Pop-art populist. His neon-hued paintings—of freaks, goons, dandies, carny folk, and accordion players—patrol the Second City’s wild sides. Paschke’s former student Jeff Koons, who organized the show, calls the effect of his mentor’s work “neurological.” Indeed, the taciturn dudes, in garish...
- Sasha Frere-Jones: What do record labels do now?
Last week, the Canadian-American indie-rock band Arcade Fire released its third album, “The Suburbs,” and played two shows at Madison Square Garden, the first of which sold out within hours. Arcade Fire is not the first act on an independent label to sell out New York . . ....
- James Wood: Teju Cole’s prismatic début novel, “Open City.”
Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind . . ....
- Art: Spring Preview
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There’s a surprise lurking in “Pet Sounds,” the Los Angeles sculptor Charles Long’s rambling network of brightly colored railings installed on the Oval Lawn of Madison Square Park: run your hands along its surface, and the work—which takes . . ....
- Rome After Raphael @ Morgan Library & Museum
A real Raphael! An actual Michelangelo! Celebrity hounds that we’ve become, these are the inevitable lures of an Old Master drawing exhibit like this one. But the more substantial works in the show were created by their contemporaries and artistic heirs: Parmigianino, Giovanni de’ Vecchi, and Giuseppe Cesari, a favorite artist of Pope Clement VIII. The most interesting part...
- Ben McGrath: A jam session on Rikers island.
A couple of dozen musicians boarded a bus in Brooklyn one recent morning. The driver, wearing a badge, offered to take their picture. “Everybody look scared,” he said, and recommended that, instead of saying “cheese,” they repeat the word “shackles.” Then he took them . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Wood: Conflict and convention in Chang-Rae Lee’s “The Surrendered.”
Does literature progress, like medicine or engineering? Nabokov seems to have thought so, and pointed out that Tolstoy, unlike Homer, was able to describe childbirth in convincing detail. Yet you could argue the opposite view; after all, no novelist strikes the modern reader as more Homeric than Tolstoy. And Homer . . ....
- Goings On About Town: Venues: Higher Pictures
980 Madison Ave. at 76th St., New York, N.Y. 10075212-249-6100...
- John Lahr: “The Cherry Orchard,” “Bonnie & Clyde” reviews.
As a stagestruck boy, Anton Chekhov defied school regulations to attend the local playhouse in Taganrog. (He and his friends disguised themselves with false beards and glasses to sit in the gallery.) Later, he came to see Russian theatre as “the venereal disease of the cities.” “I . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Letters by J. D. Salinger @ Morgan Library & Museum
March 16 - April 11 225 Madison Ave., at 36th St., New York, N.Y. 212-685-0008 . . ....
- Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review.
In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Emily Nussbaum: “Archer,” “Eastbound & Down” reviews.
8220;Archer” is a fleet, filthy sitcom, an animated half hour about a spy who is convinced that he’s the center of the universe. Created by Adam Reed, the series, on FX, blends James Bond plots and “Mad Men” looks, then marbles in the surreal . . ....
- Ben McGrath: Mary Bloom, Westminster Dog Show photographer.
Traffic stopped along Seventh Avenue, the other day, so that a small parade of dogs could cross in front of Madison Square Garden. To judge by the horde of jostling photographers and videographers, you might have thought there’d been a Brangelina sighting, or a celebrity perp walk. “ . . ....
- James Bond Seamaster
The, james bond seamaster, watch comes with a big heritage. Ian Fleming began to write the James Bond series of books in 1952. The first actor was Sean Connery as the inimitable James, James Bond....
- Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey @ Morgan Library & Museum
April 2 - August 1 225 Madison Ave., at 36th St., New York, N.Y. 212-685-0008 . . ....
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Natalie Dykstra’s “Clover Adams” review.
Born in 1843 to a wealthy, intellectual Boston family, Marian (Clover) Hooper moved in the most illustrious circles of nineteenth-century America. Henry James called her “a perfect Voltaire in petticoats”; Henry Adams married her. In Washington, she became a celebrated hostess, rode horses, and, at the age . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: James Stewart in “The Far Country,” at Film Forum.
James Stewart, America’s favorite romantic and idealistic young man, changed remarkably after the war; he became angry, tough, and self-involved, and wound up, in 1958, as a malevolent obsessive in Hitchcock’s masterpiece “Vertigo.” Along the way, Stewart made five great Westerns with the . . ....
- Books: “Young Romantics.”
Hay examines the “turbulent communal existence” of the English Romantic poets, astutely parsing the intricate circumstances that led to this network’s distinctive creative output; she shows, for instance, that “Frankenstein” emerged not merely out of fireside “conversations about ghosts and galvanism” but . . ....
- Books: Victor Cha’s “The Impossible State” review.
8220;Industrialized,” “urbanized,” and “high tech” are not words one typically associates with North Korea. Yet, in the wake of the Second World War, as China and the U.S.S.R. vied for influence in the Korean peninsula, it was just that. Since then, political paranoia, economic . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
BOOKCOURT
The novelist James Ellroy reads from his latest book, “Blood’s a Rover.” (163 Court St., Brooklyn. Sept. 30 at 7.)
“ON THE WATERFRONT IN NEW YORK”
Following a screening of “Street of Ships,” a 1982 documentary by Charles Richards about the . . ....
- Books: “American Egyptologist” by Jeffrey Abt, review.
Born in Illinois in 1865, James Henry Breasted turned an early interest in the ministry and a talent for languages into a remarkable career as America’s first formally trained Egyptologist. He specialized in the recording of inscriptions and wanted nothing less than “the recopying and republication of . . . (Subscription required.)...
