Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

SUBSCRIBE AND SAVE

SPONSORED BY KNOPF DOUBLEDAY PUBLISHING GROUP

This week on nybooks.com: Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in space, the Republican secessionists, China’s new old dream, a celebration of Sun Ra, and Jonathan Franzen’s Karl Kraus project. Plus art, music, and dance listings, and a conference on privacy and the internet.
Drowning in the Digital Abyss J. Hoberman A survival drama set almost entirely in the unfathomable abyss of outer space, Gravity is something now quite rare—a truly popular big-budget Hollywood movie with a rich aesthetic pay-off. Genuinely experimental, blatantly predicated on the formal possibilities of film, Gravity is a movie in a tradition that includes Griffith’s Intolerance and Hitchcock’s The Birds, as well as its most obvious precursor, Kubrick’s 2001. Call it blockbuster modernism.
Back Door Secession Garry Wills John Boehner holds the nation hostage because the Tea Party holds him hostage. The problem with modern Republicans is not fanaticism in the few but cowardice in the many, who let their fellows live in virtual secession from laws they disagree with.
Old Dreams for a New China Ian Johnson Ever since China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, first uttered the phrase “China Dream” last year, people in China and abroad have been scrambling to decipher its meaning. A nationwide barrage of propaganda posters that went up starting in July gives a clearer explanation of what he is up to.
					Sun Ra: A True Birthday Seth Colter Walls It was a welcome sight, the Sun Ra Arkestra’s appearance at Jazz at Lincoln Center—an institution with a grand tradition of celebrating Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, but which has historically stopped short of offering much attention to the avant-garde.
Torch Song in Vienna Michael Hofmann In the Viennese culture of his day, Karl Kraus is perhaps best understood as a sort of center of power with very little radiating effect, a nimbus with barbs. In his lifetime, he was an arbiter, a controller, a dictator: the books, the personal appearances, all of them together one perpetuum mobile of solipsistic self-reinforcement. A multimedia campaign, KK on every channel, cock of the walk, dominator, top dog. I see his place not so much in literature as in the history of aggression, Publizistik, boosterism, feuding, polemics, PR.
ART Springtime of the Renaissance Geoffrey Wheatcroftrecommends this “riveting and lovely” show that demonstrates the deep Classical roots of early Renaissance art.		DANCE The Houston Ballet Mark Morris’s lush Pacific and Stanton Welch’s unusual Play are highlights next week at the Joyce Theater, says Laura Marsh.		FILM A Tribute to Karen Black J. Hobermanpicks BAM’s screening of films starring an actress who “personified the New Hollywood of the late 60s and early 70s.”		CONFERENCE Power, Privacy and the Internet James Bamford, Emily Bell, Nicholas Lemann, Kenneth Roth, Wen Yunchao, and others look at the role of the internet both as a vehicle of political and cultural dissent and as a weapon of repression and control.