Each week, the editors of Goings On share online happenings that caught their eye.
Art
The fifty-sixth Venice Biennale doesn’t officially open until Saturday morning, but the line to see Joan Jonas’s installation at the U.S. Pavilion was already long by midweek. The septuagenarian multimedia pioneer has had a busy career in Europe for years, but on her home turf—even in her native New York—the burn has been slower. So it’s gratifying to see Jonas’s omnifarious art receive the attention that it has deserved since the early seventies, when her renegade actions included sneaking onto a Chambers Street pier and leading a group of friends, one of whom was Gordon Matta-Clark, in bewitching rituals for the now canonical “Songdelay.” (Jonas discusses the piece here.) Jonas’s project for Venice, “They Come to Us Without a Word,” continues her longtime interest in nature; she has summered in Nova Scotia for decades, and the region’s ghost stories figure into the piece, as does the writing of the Icelandic Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness. Also in the mix are such favorite motifs as dogs, masks, and mirrors, as well as a musical element conceived with her frequent collaborator, the American jazz musician Jason Moran. The performance won’t occur until the end of July, but you can watch their 2014 collaboration “Reanimation” in the meantime.—Andrea K. Scott
Theatre
Don’t you dare forget that this Sunday is Mother’s Day. Did you buy a card? Why not consider taking your mother to a Broadway show? There’s a lot of mom-friendly fare right now: “On the Town,” “An American in Paris,” and “The King and I” are all safe bets. If your old lady has more adventurous tastes, however, consider one of the many shows that feature utterly dysfunctional relationships between mothers and children. In “Fun Home,” Alison Bechdel’s mother sings a heartbreaking ballad about her husband’s homosexual affairs. In “Wolf Hall,” Anne Boleyn gets beheaded after she can’t manage to birth a male heir. (No matter that her daughter is the future Queen Elizabeth.) In “Fish in the Dark,” Larry David hires his secret half brother to dress up as his father’s ghost and haunt his mother. “Hamlet” is playing Off Broadway; that’s a doozy. And if you really don’t feel awkward watching racy stuff next to your parents, there’s “Hand to God,” in which a woman has rough sex with a teen-ager in her son’s Christian-puppetry class. Finally, though it’s not on Broadway right now, the mother of all stage mothers is unquestionably Rose from “Gypsy,” played by Patti LuPone in this video. Mamma mia!—Michael Schulman
Night Life
Members of the English art-rock juggernaut Pink Floyd have long railed against the record business. On “Have a Cigar,” off its 1975 album “Wish You Were Here,” they satirically addressed the process of getting signed to a label, ascribing the following embarrassing lines to a clueless record executive: “The band is just fantastic / That is really what I think / Oh by the way, which one's Pink?” In an interview on Sunday in the Times of London, Roger Waters, the band’s onetime leader, extended that antipathy to technology innovators, too, calling them a “gallery of rogues and thieves.” He said that he felt privileged to have come of age “when there was a music business and the takeover by Silicon Valley hadn’t happened and, in consequence, you could still make a living writing and recording songs and playing them to people.” His words generated headlines across the Internet this week (not those words, exactly, more the ones where he said the tech people were out to “steal every fucking cent anybody ever made” and that a Pink Floyd reunion was “out of the question”). In an online discussion prompted by the interview, the suggestion arose that the problem wasn’t technology, per se, but the consumer. The truth, however, is that Waters and his fellow-musicians enjoyed a singular moment, roughly parallel to the American century, when performers could get rich off of recorded music. It was technology—specifically the LP and the highly lucrative CD—that provided the astonishing revenue for the rock-star life style. Conversely, this is a wonderful time to be a fan of music. For example, Waters’s 1982 film “Pink Floyd—The Wall,” is easy to stream online in multiple places.—John Donohue
Food & Drink
Racines NY, reviewed in this week’s magazine, serves casual, elegant updates of classic French dishes and unusual wines, in the fashion of neo-bistros in Paris. Eating there is comfortable, perhaps because the service is not fawning (could there be a backlash to all that Danny Meyer good will?) but confident and perceptive without attitude, which is more unusual than it should be. The updates of French cuisine are subtle, yet noticeable: chicken-liver pâté is whipped light as air, lamb is served as a lovely array of paleo-friendly hunks of meat with a rich harissa paste and a fruity salsa verde. The anti-establishment movement Le Fooding (considered a form of culinary Futurism by Adam Gopnik), whose mission seems to be to upend the dour perception of French cuisine as unrelentingly staid, was formed as a response to a crisis: French food needed to be saved. The neo-bistros of Paris have been doing just that for the past few years (the Gourmet Forager blog has a list of some of the best casual bistros in Paris, with helpful photos), and it’s nice that now there’s a neo-bistro in New York doing it, too. Foie-gras-and-quail tourte as big as your head? Oui, s’il vous plaît.—Shauna Lyon
Movies
The screenwriter and novelist Don Mankiewicz died last month, at the age of ninety-three. He was the son of Herman J. Mankiewicz, who co-wrote the script for “Citizen Kane” with Orson Welles, as well as the nephew of the writer-director-producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz. He was also a member of the family—the first story that he ever wrote was sold to and published by The New Yorker in 1945, when he was twenty-three, and he joined the editorial staff soon thereafter. His credits for movies and television were noteworthy (they included a script for “Star Trek” and the pilots for “Marcus Welby, M.D.” and “Ironside”) but perhaps the most prestigious of them was the 1957 television adaptation of “The Last Tycoon,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished roman à clef about the producer Irving Thalberg.
As a son and nephew of Thalberg’s employees at M-G-M, Don Mankiewicz was well placed to know how that meteoric studio chief dealt with his underlings and vice versa; he also had laid eyes on Fitzgerald, whose own relatively unhappy stints as a screenwriter took place at that studio (initially, under Thalberg’s aegis). Mankiewicz brought a daring perspective to the adaptation of “The Last Tycoon,” which was done for the famed “Playhouse 90” series and was directed by John Frankenheimer. As Mankiewicz explained to the oral historian Stephen W. Bowie, he ended the script as Fitzgerald ended the unfinished novel, as an “incomplete story,” rather than attempt to construct a dramatic ending according to his own lights or to Fitzgerald’s notes.
The drama stars Jack Palance as the Thalberg character, whom Fitzgerald called Monroe Stahr; his girlfriend, Cecelia—the daughter of a producer—is played by Lee Remick, who appears only briefly in this clip; and the alcoholic director, Nick Zavras, whom Stahr has to manage (in the novel, he’s the cameraman Pete Zavras), is played by one of the most expressively tormented figures in all cinema, Peter Lorre, who rose to fame as the serial killer in Fritz Lang’s “M.” Mankiewicz has more remarkable tales about the production (“Jack Palance is a good actor, but he can’t play a Jew”) and about Fitzgerald and the book (“That was Lee Remick’s first television [appearance], and she, oddly enough, was able to tell me something I didn’t know, which was that the character of Cecelia was actually modeled on Budd Schulberg”).
Whatever else the Mankiewicz/Frankenheimer adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel suggests, it also reveals that the age of quality television—with its delights as well as its limitations—was a part of the medium from the very start.—Richard Brody
