August 11, 2016 Our Correspondents The Language of Dogs By Lucy Sante Now that dogs have acquired the ability to speak, what are we to make of their discourse? Previously we might have expected them to be simple in both their desires and their expressions, limiting themselves to requests for food and play. While those concerns certainly loom large in their conversation, it is clear that all along we had been underestimating their perspicacity, their nuance, their humor, their judgment, and most surprisingly their pedantry. The subject shown above, known as Pierre, was the first recorded example of a speaking dog. Last April he startled his host family, the Van Munchings of Bedburg, New York, by pointing out, apropos of nothing, that it was high time they cleaned the filter in their dehumidifier, adding for good measure that the tires on their Armada were badly in need of rotation. Pierre broached the subject in the mild and apologetic fashion that would come to be known as his hallmark, but that did not prevent Ethel Van Munching from dropping the dishes she was carrying to the kitchen table. Pierre, naturally, gobbled the eggs and bacon the instant they hit the floor, so that the family briefly thought they had simply experienced a collective hallucination. Moments later, however, Pierre was reminding them that their quarterly homeowner insurance payment was past due. It has still not been determined whether Pierre can actually read. Read More
August 8, 2016 Our Correspondents How Do I Live? I Live. By Alison Kinney La bohème, live at Attica State Correctional Facility. The mess hall at Attica Correctional Facility, 1977. Photo (c) Karl R. Josker. Used with permission. Opera audiences are all the same. There are always two bald guys seated in the third row, whispering a phrase-by-phrase critique. Someone cups his ear, frustrated by the hall’s faulty acoustics. Everyone looks daggers at the miscreant whose phone interrupts an aria. And some listeners sit with their hands folded under their chins, eyes half-closed in reverie. One man perches literally on the edge of his seat, listening with his whole body; his chest seems to swell with the singers’ every breath. Afterward, I’m not surprised when he says that, before today, “I didn’t know that Latinos do opera,” but “for a brief fifteen minutes, I was up there, I was singing.” On August 2, performers from the Glimmerglass Festival, the summer opera festival based in upstate Cooperstown, New York, hit the road for a one-hour matinee of excerpts from Giacomo Puccini’s lush, popular opera about Parisian artists, friends, and lovers, La bohème (1896). The cast waited onstage, in costume, while an audience numbering about 150 took their seats: emerging from the cellblocks, they’d walked, in double rows, in groups of no more than forty, through several barred gates into the hall. Officers armed with batons ringed their seats, forming a standing-room only section. At the conclusion of the concert, when inmates leapt to their feet for a standing ovation, two officers shifted closer together, eyeing them: the ones who’d risen sat down immediately. We were at Attica State Correctional Facility. Read More
August 5, 2016 Our Correspondents A Fan’s Notes By Matthew St. Ville Hunte How sports taught me to think. The 1994 NBA Finals. Noam Chomsky once said that he was amazed at the insight and sophistication that the average American brought to the discussion of sports. Chomsky considered this use of brainpower to be a diversion that operated in the service of power. “One of the functions that things like professional sports play,” he said, “is to offer an area to deflect people’s attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference.” I guess he is right enough in his way, but for my part I hold with the literary historian Gerald Graff, who has argued that his youthful fascination with sports was not a form of anti-intellectualism, as he once thought. Instead, Graff has come to believe, fandom was a form of intellectual development by other means. Read More
August 4, 2016 Our Correspondents Garbage Connector By Wei Tchou How the Brooklyn Bridge became a living landfill. Photo: Brooklyn Daily Eagle/Mary Frost. I too saw the satin ribbons, the scrunchies, the clothing tags, the fat knots of underwear and panty hose, had my eyes dazzled by the foil of a bag of potato chips, the ripped labels of Poland Spring water bottles, look’d on the clear plastic rosary with a cross, the teak mantra beads strung on red thread, look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of a plastic spoon, and saw how four black locks neatly proselytized in gold marker (JESUS <3’S YOU, BE A CHRISTIAN, KEEP GOD <3 FIRST <3, GOD IS GREAT). Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge one evening last week, I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me when I saw the white diaphanous fluff of tampons—unused, I hope—that had been tied to the railings by the living crowd. Read More
August 3, 2016 Our Correspondents American Girl Night By Jeff Seroy Photo: Saratoga Performing Arts Center. No one could miss the magic. Cool alleys of giant pines wind through the park, the entrance by footbridge leads over a creek; far below, you can glimpse striated mounds accreted by live mineral springs. And then: the stately grounds. Even today, in its celebratory fiftieth-anniversary season, with a new plaza built around stadium-size latrines and concessions selling fried dough, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center maintains some of its Nelson-and-Happy Rockefeller–era allure. The center was built to offer New York City Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra permanent summer residencies, and though attendance at dance events and the dance season itself have shrunk considerably over the past thirty years, coming to SPAC still feels eventful. The audience is filled with fans. They dress for the occasion. They know the performers. They roar with recognition when someone introduces the evening’s program. They cheer during curtain calls. They applaud, contrary to City Ballet’s urban custom, when dancers exit, and at the end of each musical section. They even clap for the scenery. Read More
August 2, 2016 Our Correspondents On Transcribing the Lyrics to Pop Songs By Anthony Madrid Still from Adriano Celentano’s music video for “Prisencolinensinainciusol.” You really can’t tell what a song is going to look like until you type it, and that fact itself is interesting to me. When you listen to a song, for instance, you don’t know whether its “stanzas” are in quatrains or tercets or what. The stanzas and line breaks you install when you type the lyrics simply were not there before you typed them. They were not in your head, and they were not really in the song either. You discover all kinds of things. For example, I recently typed up the words to Cream’s “White Room” (1968). Before doing that, I didn’t know that the song does not rhyme. If someone had asked me if it rhymed, I would’ve had to sing it to find out. It somehow seems like it rhymes? But how is that possible. I go around telling people that 99 percent of songs rhyme. Is that true? It might not be. Maybe songs all seem like they rhyme, but when you actually check … ? Read More