November 22, 2016 Our Correspondents Oh! You Tony By Elena Passarello The Daily’s newest correspondent is Elena Passarello, who will be writing about famous animals from history. This week’s beast is the silent-film star Tony the Wonder Horse. Design by Kristen Radtke. Tom Mix and Tony at their best! Rip snortin’ action!—break neck horsemanship! A thrill for everybody! —Destry Rides Again promo poster, 1932. When they were about to do a difficult scene, Tom would pat Tony on his nose and say, “Now, look, Tony, here’s the way we’re going to do this.” And then that was the way they did it. —Olive Mix, 1957. Tom once told a newspaperman that I liked to show off. Well, I’ll tell you something. He likes to show off too. Do you think he would do all those difficult and dangerous tricks if he thought nobody would see them? —“Tony’s Story Told By Tony Himself,” 1923. Read More
November 22, 2016 On the Shelf We Don’t Really Know Anything About Anything, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, Girl with a Book, ca. 1875. William Trevor, an Irish writer who saw the short-story form as a chance to perfect “the art of the glimpse,” has died at eighty-eight. “His plots often unfolded in Irish or English villages whose inhabitants, most of them hanging on to the bottom rung of the lower middle class, waged unequal battle with capricious fate. In ‘The Ballroom of Romance,’ one of his most famous stories, a young woman caring for her crippled father looks for love in a dance hall but settles, week after week, for a few drunken kisses from a local bachelor. The hero of ‘The Day We Got Drunk on Cake’ repeatedly phones a young woman he admires in between drinking sessions at a series of pubs. The relationship deepens and, during a final call in the wee hours, takes a sudden, unexpected turn.” Let’s put some things in perspective about human knowledge. Sure, there are plenty of things we know as facts (New York thin crust is superior to Chicago deep dish) and others we can be basically sure of (Donald Trump prowls the outer boroughs at night in a latex superhero costume, torturing stray cats and hyperventilating into a paper bag), but many even more basic matters remain mysterious to us. Consciousness, for instance. We don’t know shit about consciousness. In a new series, Tim Parks asks the philosopher Riccardo Manzotti to take him into the riddle: “Why doesn’t our behavior simply happen, taking its course the way the planets follow their orbits? We don’t know. Just as cosmologists don’t know what dark matter is. All we know is that there is something that doesn’t add up and very likely points to some profound error in our assumptions about reality … The truth is that we just don’t know a priori the nature of physical reality. This is a point Bertrand Russell made very strongly back in the 1920s. The more we investigate the physical, the more varied and complex it appears.” Read More
November 21, 2016 Contests Win Free Tickets to 92Y’s Celebration of Albert Murray By The Paris Review On Monday, November 28, 92Y will host Renata Adler, Paul Devlin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Wynton Marsalis, and Ayana Mathis for a celebration of Albert Murray, the critic, novelist, essayist, and biographer, who died in 2013. The Library of America has just published Murray’s Collected Essays and Memoirs. “His writing about racism can prickle your skin,” Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times. “To paraphrase Murray’s praise of Ellison’s Invisible Man, reading this book is like watching someone take a twelve-bar blues song and score it for a full orchestra.” You can enter here to win two free tickets to Monday’s event from The Paris Review and 92Y. We’ll notify the winners this Friday, November 25. Thanks and good luck!
November 21, 2016 Look No Work Today By Dan Piepenbring “No Work Today,” an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculptures by the Dutch artist Parra, is on display at Joshua Liner Gallery through December 17. Parra is, to my knowledge, the only professional artist who has also been a professional skateboarder. Parra, No Work Today, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 55″ x 39″. Read More
November 21, 2016 Our Correspondents Theater 101 By Alison Kinney On civility, risk, and the demonization of dissent. Maxime Dethomas, set design sketch for Les abeilles, 1917. I’m using this fifth installment of my opera column to offer a primer on theater, protest, and safety, by people who actually know about theater. As you’ve likely heard, at the November 18 evening performance of the musical Hamilton, Mike Pence was booed (and also cheered) by members of the audience. After the show, the cast assembled onstage to address him with a statement written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and read by the performer Brandon Victor Dixon. He said, in part, “We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.” Donald Trump tweeted his reactions, writing in one message, “The Theater must always be a safe and special place. The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!” #BoycottHamilton trended on Twitter on Saturday. We witnessed the absurd spectacle of an incoming administration that threatens every kind of safety for marginalized people, yet demands an antiharassment safe space. Of one elected leader’s turning his back on a diverse group of Americans politely requesting protection and dialogue, and another’s attacking them. Although these Hamilton tweets are possibly a ploy by Trump to distract attention from the Trump University settlement, his reaction to the Hamilton incident is important: it’s about weaponizing the discourse of civility and respectability against the people who stand to lose the most in the next four years. I asked for responses from playwrights, performers, directors, and scholars who belong to artistic and academic communities that are all endangered by the Trump presidency. Here are their answers, in alphabetical order by first name, with their own descriptors. Read More
November 21, 2016 On the Shelf Impersonating Trump in China, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring In China, Tang Xinhua, a retired music professor, is preparing for a new career as a Trump impersonator. Photo: Zou Dangrong, via the New York Times. You know times are hard when you find yourself looking forward to reading the nominees for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Maybe their heinousness will be the ultimate distraction from Trump—in the same way that you can divert your attention from a headache by punching yourself in the arm repeatedly, forcefully. Here’s some bad sex from Tom Connolly’s Men Like Air: “The walkway to the terminal was all carpet, no oxygen. Dilly bundled Finn into the first restroom on offer, locked the cubicle door and pulled at his leather belt. ‘You’re beautiful,’ she told him, going down on to her haunches and unzipping him. He watched her passport rise gradually out of the back pocket of her jeans in time with the rhythmic bobbing of her buttocks as she sucked him. He arched over her back and took hold of the passport before it landed on the pimpled floor. Despite the immediate circumstances, human nature obliged him to take a look at her passport photo.” Impersonation is a hot ticket in China—with practice, chutzpah, and a little bit of luck, you can make a good living pretending to be a famous politician. (And they say America is the land of opportunity.) So now a national search is on for an ersatz Donald Trump, a swaggering caricature who can really channel that bigoted je ne sais quoi. Zou Dangrong, who runs an agency of impersonators in Beijing, believes he’s found the perfect ringer: a retired music professor named Tang Xinhua. But can they get his skin to look orange enough? “The goal is to get Mr. Tang looking enough like Mr. Trump that he can impersonate the president-elect and entertain at lucrative company debuts, shopping mall openings and New Year’s galas … It is all good, clean fun with high artistic standards, [Mr. Zou] said … ‘The hair color can easily be changed with dye jobs—temporary color, not permanent, keeping it in for an hour or two,’ [Mr. Zou] said. ‘We’ve asked tailors to make the same clothes that Trump wore in his campaign, though maybe from less expensive material.’ ” Read More