My second year of being a roving cultural correspondent began with a geographic shift: in January, The New Yorker moved from Times Square to our new home in Tribeca, at 1 World Trade Center. From my new desk, on the thirty-eighth floor, I can turn around and look out the window and see our old building. Walk around the floor and you can see the whole city. My perspective has shifted a little, because of that and because of the year’s many joys and sadnesses, intensifying my appreciation of the culture I’ve experienced. Here are my favorite and most memorable moments—many of them live.
In January, I discovered the wonderful world of Richard McGuire, by reading (and gazing at) his richly imagined and illustrated book “Here,” and by going to a fascinating talk that he and Bill Kartalopolous had about it at 192 Books. They talked about McGuire’s journey from downtown street artist (working with Haring and Basquiat) and musician (the great Liquid Liquid) to creating “Here” and a new kind of visual storytelling, at once daring and gentle, intimate and transcendent.
On February 5th, a week before he died, David Carr moderated a panel at the New School about podcasts, featuring four of its stars: Alex Blumberg, of “StartUp,” Alix Spiegel, of “Invisibilia,” Sarah Koenig, of “Serial,” and Benjamen Walker, of “Theory of Everything.” It was a moment of podcast ascendancy, and Carr helped us understand it as only he could. “Were you surprised at your ability to strip naked, jump over the fence, and sell ads?” he asked Blumberg, who had transitioned from public radio to founding Gimlet, a for-profit media company. He praised Blumberg’s work on the story “The Giant Pool of Money,” for “This American Life,” by saying that it had outdone the Times_’_s work on the financial crisis: “These bing-bongs from public radio came in and just killed it!”
February brought about a national reckoning: having been forced to adjust to a post-“Colbert Report” world, we had to begin to contemplate what we’d do without Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” By the time we watched his announcement, on the February 10th episode, the news had hit. The whole show, from his usual rushed, it’s-not-about-me “Welcome to ‘The Daily Show,’ my name is Jon Stewart” to the brisk, heartfelt announcement (“This show doesn’t deserve an even slightly restless host, and neither do you”; “What is this fluid? What are these feelings?”) to the Moment of Zen (a chimpanzee washing a cat in a sink, set to ragtime piano), had the feeling of celebration and mourning.
In early March, I saw “Hamilton,” at the Public Theatre. I’m a big crier—from joy more than from sadness, generally—and in writing, I try to be judicious about mentioning it, so I don’t drown everybody. But the crying I did during the first act of “Hamilton”—the entire first act of “Hamilton”—is part of my memory of the show itself. I was crying in appreciation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliance and wit, of the electric performances, of the owning of American history by a multiethnic cast. I felt as if I was watching art moving forward, onward, and upward. “Hamilton” is on another level, and I hope Broadway continues to rise up to meet it.
Last spring, Debbie Harry sang at the Café Carlyle, proving herself to be an entertaining chanteuse and raconteuse. At the end of the night, she sang “The Rainbow Connection,” made famous by Kermit the Frog. As she sang, a fan waved, and she waved back. More fans waved, and she waved to them, too. “Someday, we’ll find it, the rainbow connection,” she sang. “The lovers, the dreamers, and me.”
On March 26th, there was a terrible gas explosion in the East Village, which killed two young men and destroyed three buildings on the corner of Second Avenue and Seventh Street. I watched the smoke fill the air from my desk at the World Trade Center, then went to my apartment, a block away from the site, astonished at what I saw. I spent the next day writing about it. Afterward, I wanted to lie on my couch, numb, but I raced over to Brooklyn to see a workshop performance of “A Star Has Burnt My Eye,” my friend Howard Fishman’s forthcoming play, with music, about the brilliant and mysterious singer-songwriter Connie Converse. It was incredible, as was she; the show had me transfixed, joyful, and grateful. It reminded me, yet again, of what art is for.
When I first viewed the young filmmaker Oscar Sharp’s stunningly beautiful short “The Kármán Line,” I was almost in shock, it was so good. I didn’t know anything about it, which is the ideal way to see it. (If that’s you, by all means, watch it now. It’s twenty minutes long. Then read the interview.) I met Sharp in late March, in the East Village, a few days after the explosion, and as we ate burgers and drank root beer while attempting to patronize one of the affected businesses, he told me about his love of on-the-nose metaphors—“an impossible thing that everyone knows is a metaphor for this possible thing”—and his chosen genre, what he calls “magical social realism.” “I’m being slightly ridiculous, of course,” he said. Sharp is a huge talent, masterly with tone and style; I’m eager to see what he does with a feature-length film.
Last spring, I fell in love with the music of Dom La Nena, who composes and performs gorgeous cello pop, sometimes with a samba beat; she sings, softly but confidently, in French, Portuguese, Spanish, and English. After my burger with Oscar Sharp, I raced over to the club SubCulture and heard her play—one of the freshest and most thrilling concerts I saw all year. She plucked her cello, sang, got people to stand up and dance, discouraged a clap-along with self-possessed charm, and glided through the crowd playing ukulele. We were still singing “La Nena Soy Yo” after she left.
In May, the New York Philharmonic performed “What’s Opera, Doc?” and other classics of the Looney Tunes genre, with visuals. “I’ve seen the same thing everywhere,” the conductor of the series, George Daugherty, told me. “I look at this serious, world-renowned orchestra and I see musicians singing, ‘Oh, Brünnhilde, you’re so wuv-wy, yes I know it, I can’t help it.’ They grew up on this music, too.”
The documentary-theatre group the Civilians completed their yearlong residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in May, with “The Way They Live,” a show of songs about the art of the American Wing—“Washington Crossing the Delaware,” “The Last Moments of John Brown,” and so on—based on interviews with patrons and staff. It was utterly lovely, quietly provocative, and ephemeral: performed only twice, which is my only complaint.
In June, Judy Blume came to the 92nd Street Y to discuss her new novel for grownups, “In the Unlikely Event”—which I loved just as much as I loved “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing”—and to warmly accept the love of a roomful of lifelong admirers. The host, Samantha Bee, said, “I don’t often get starstruck, but tonight is a profound exception to that rule.”
The Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull walked me through the new Pixar exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science just after “Inside Out” was released, explaining how various details of light and movement make things look alive or dead—your eyes move before your head, for example, and sunlight shines through your nose, and walking produces a slight shock wave when your heel hits the ground. Observation, I realized, is key for scientists and artists alike. Artists and technical people are closely aligned, Catmull said. “I think there should be more art in schools. When they cut funding, they cut from art programs, shop programs. But they’re really about seeing and developing observational skills, which is useful in science. A lot of the people here grew up on art and math, and this is a place to mix them together.”
Somehow, despite my ardent fandom, I’d missed Annie Baker’s “The Flick” the first time around; in August, seeing it, at the Barrow Street Theatre, and the astonishingly wise and empathetic “John,” at the Signature Center, completely blew my mind. Her ear is extraordinary, as is her quiet humor. “I always thought it would be a wonderful thing to be a doll,” one elderly character in “John” says. “To be free of responsibility. To be able to provide joy to people without even moving. Without even saying anything.” “You’re dead wrong, Mertis,” her friend says. “It’s a terrible fate.”
Ferrante Fever, as the condition is proudly called by Elena Ferrante’s publisher, Europa Editions, has been building for the past few years, since the release of the first book of the Neapolitan novels, “My Brilliant Friend.” But I have had that fever for a decade, because, as her translator Ann Goldstein’s devoted apprentice and friend, I have been proofreading Ferrante since “The Days of Abandonment,” published in 2005. The thrill of breaking The New Yorker_’_s style rules—violating all kinds of American grammatical conventions as we go—has been only one of the joys of working on Ferrante’s arresting, unputdownable books. Another has been trying to figure out how Ferrante manages to make her plot twists so character-driven and inevitable, and of basking in that strange and wonderful feeling that the books were written just for you. Seeing mobs of readers cheer for Ann, focussing their love on absent author and present translator at once, has been thrilling to behold. It’s not every day that BookCourt evokes Altamont.
I’ve always loved Joe Jackson, and when I got the chance to see him play a little show before his tour for his new album, “Fast Forward,” in September, I jumped at it. He was fantastic—and, to my supreme delight, so was his new album. I spoke to him about it a few days later, and we agreed that it was exciting when artists who’ve been performing for a few decades are still writing great new music. “It’s a lot more interesting being an adult than being a child,” he told me. Reactions from his tour stop in Northampton, Massachusetts, ranged from enraptured hand-holding (my dad and stepmother) to joyful sobbing (my friend Ken).
The second-best swearfest of 2015 made us all feel a little more Bostonian.
It was a sad year for bar closings, shop closings, and the general squashing of independents by luxury this-and-that nightmares, but it was also a delightful year for openings, and in my capacity as a Bar Tab writer I’ve visited some terrific new bars. The Rainbow Room came back, and with it the bar SixtyFive—expensive, silvery, and forbidding, but with knockout views. The Holiday Cocktail Lounge, in the East Village, revives a neighborhood legend, in a form palatable to boozers old and new. Sid Gold’s Request Room, where the great Joe McGinty plays piano for karaoke of everything from Joy Division to the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da,” felt immediately timeless and wonderful, like it should have been here all along; there’s no happier seat in town than one of the barstools around his piano. Wassail, which is more a restaurant than a bar, made me realize exciting new things about hard cider—it doesn’t have to be sweet, for example—and about vegetarian food, which I have been eating exclusively for about twenty-five years. Porsena Extra Bar, while not very new, continues to be one of my favorite places in the world.
Isabella Rossellini’s live tribute to her mother, Ingrid Bergman, with Jeremy Irons at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, evoked Bergman’s life in vivid, beautiful detail, from “Gaslight” to “Casablanca” to Roberto Rossellini, “Stromboli,” and beyond. Rossellini said to me, “A lot of people have asked me, ‘Was she an early feminist?’ She was an artist. She had to do what she had to do.”
John Oliver’s hilarious, cathartic tirade after the Paris terrorist attacks in November—the best swearfest of the year—was exactly what we needed. “Fuck them, if I may say, sideways!” he said, making some hand gestures. Then he really let it rip.
This summer and fall, learning more about the Bill Cosby accusations, observing people sticking up for his victims and other survivors of sexual abuse, seeing the great and important movies “Call Me Lucky” and “Spotlight,” and talking to Judd Apatow, Barry Crimmins, Bobcat Goldthwait, and the “Spotlight” journalists Sacha Pfeiffer, Mike Rezendes, Walter Robinson, and Marty Baron, I felt as if I’d woken up to something that we’d all been sleeping through. “Call Me Lucky” showed us an angry, wise, profane, heroic comedian who had survived rape as a child and gone on to help nab pedophiles and protect kids; “Spotlight” detailed the process of an institution becoming aware of systemic abuse and making the world aware of it, too. “I hope that ‘Spotlight’ will cause us all to listen to people who are essentially voiceless, and listen to them closely,” Marty Baron, the editor of the Washington Post, told me. I hope that 2016 continues this process. Seeing “Call Me Lucky” and “Spotlight” is a good place to start.
