Doppelgänger: Barry Levinson's The Alto Knights

Robert De Niro and Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Witty, gripping and grandly entertaining, Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights centers on the complicated relationship of two legendary Mafiosi, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, who were both recruited to work for bootlegger Giuseppe Masseria in the 1920s alongside Lucky Luciano. After the murders of Masseria and his successor, Salvatore Maranzano, Genovese became Luciano’s second in command with Costello, who claimed to have abjured violence at the end of the First World War and stopped carrying a gun, as his consigliere. Genovese took over in 1936 when Luciano went to prison and expanded the operations of the organization Luciano had reconfigured as the Commission into narcotics. But he had to flee the U.S. to avoid a murder charge and took sanctuary in Italy. (Both men had been born there: Costello in Naples, Genovese in Calabria.) Costello took over, trading drugs for gambling. When Genovese returned to the States after the war – neatly bypassing conviction for that old killing when two key witnesses against him turned up dead – he didn’t take well to being his former colleague’s underboss. All of this narrative is background, much of it unstated or understated, to Levinson’s picture, which takes place in 1957, the year Costello appeared before the Senate Committee investigating the Mafia, and the year Genovese engineered the assassination of the former head of Murder Inc., Albert Anastasia, and attempted unsuccessfully to eliminate Costello.

Form and Legacy: Jane Corkin’s Vision of Photography as Fine Art

A display wall from Between Life and Light at the Jane Corkin Gallery.

The Jane Corkin Gallery’s 45th-anniversary exhibition, Between Life and Light, begins with the space itself: a historic tank house in Toronto’s Distillery District. The oak floors and wooden beams, reimagined in 2003 by architects Shim-Sutcliffe, create a gallery of light and levels that feels both expansive and intimate. This architectural transformation mirrors the exhibition’s premise—photography as a continuum of history and innovation, spanning nearly two centuries from 1857 to 2024.

Two Visionaries Walk Into a Bar: Huysmans and Huxley

(Both titles: Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.)

“This was the attraction of the abyss over which one is leaning, that of a life lived at white heat. It was a deliberate abdication of day to day struggles, the removal of the difficulties of existence.”

--J .K. Huysmans

“We live together, we act on and react to one another but always we are by ourselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

--Aldous Huxley

As T.A. Brown pointed out in the article “The Technology That Actually Runs The World” last December in The Atlantic Monthly, the most dominant algorithms aren’t necessarily the ones choosing what songs Spotify serves up to you supposedly based on your personal tastes, but rather the ones that control everything you see, hear or read by controlling
all the art the even gets made before it’s made, as a result of prevailing consumer taste mechanisms that it can interpret more efficiently than the most canny culture critics ever could. The article suggested that these algorithms dictate everything, from which books are published and what art gets seen, in a revolutionary paradigm shift that has become entrenched in the arts and media. The essential premise was that in 2024 culture became boring and stale due to these thuggish algorithms’ calling the shots on what gets first produced, and then gets praised. The idea is that Big Tech has flattened culture into a facsimile of its former self, and that algorithmic recommendation engines have created what amounts to a lack of all forward momentum. But long before computers ever existed, except in the minds of visionary science fiction authors such as Yevgeny Zamyatin (author of the mindblowing 1922 novel WE) and Aldous Huxley (author of the book Zamyatin inspired, Brave New World in 1931), concerns were already beginning to float to the surface of our consciousness. Or at least to the consciousness of a few heroic prescients.

Potpourri: Love Life, Don’t Eat the Mangos and Beckett Briefs

Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell in Love Life. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The review of Don’t Eat the Mangos contains spoilers.

The great Jewish Weimar composer Kurt Weill fled Berlin for New York in the early thirties. Nothing he wrote for Broadway earned him the fame he’d garnered as Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator in Germany, but he produced the music for eight shows between 1936 and 1949 (he died in 1950 at the age of fifty while he was working on a musical based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) with a fascinating range of librettists including Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, S.J. Perelman, Ogden Nash and Maxwell Anderson. And though the shows were a mixed bag, his music was usually glorious. The 1947 opera he and the poet Langston Hughes fashioned from Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene, set in a Manhattan tenement, may be the most exquisite score anyone has written for Broadway besides Porgy and Bess.

Lost and Found: Christine Byl’s Lookout

(Deep Vellum/A Strange Object.)

A few weeks ago, somewhat bored by what I was currently reading, I rummaged through my pile of unread books, and picked up a novel called Lookout, by Christine Byl. It was a signed copy, but I have no idea how I acquired it. I think it might have been in a swag bag handed to me at a literary gala. In other words, by pure chance. The book was published in 2023 by a small, independent Texan press called Deep Vellum, under their A Strange Object imprint. I thought I’d read a few pages and see if it was any good. 273 pages later, I was in tears, moved and entranced by this tale of the loving but precariously dysfunctional Kinzler family living in rural Montana. The book spans the years from 1985 to 2009, mainly focusing on their younger of two daughters, Cody.

You Wouldn't Want to Live There: Chaos: The Manson Murders

Errol Morris’s Chaos: The Manson Murders is a shallow dip in a deep pool of conspiracy and weirdness. The book it’s based on—CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), by Tom O'Neill, with Dan Piepenbring—is only one of many in the last thirty years or so whose title promised “secret history”; unlike others, it delivered. O'Neill found a multitude of buried facts and forgotten documents. He highlighted existing holes in the standard version of the Manson murders, and punched many new ones. What he didn’t do was offer a unified-field theory, with all questions answered, all contradictions squared; and that, aside from the evidence he delivered, was O’Neill’s edge over other conspiracists. The sum of his unearthing, as he readily admitted, was a mound of irreducible mystery, uncanny remains forming no definitive shape. CHAOS was both enormous fun and disturbing to the point of nightmare.

Haunted: Ibsen's Ghosts at Lincoln Center

Lily Rabe and Levon Hawke in Ghosts. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

When she reviewed Shoot the Moon in 1982, the film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “I’m a little afraid to say how good I think [it] is – I don’t want to set up the kind of bad magic that might cause people to say they were led to expect so much that they were disappointed.” Every critic who has been at the job for a long time recognizes this dilemma, though God knows it doesn’t come around very often. Kael’s next sentence is “But I’m even more afraid that I can’t come near doing this picture justice.” That’s my mood as I sit down to compose my thoughts on Jack O’Brien’s revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts, from a new adaptation by Mark O’Rowe, which will be playing upstairs in Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through April 13. O’Brien, who served as artistic director at the Old Globe in San Diego for four and a half decades, has helmed dozens of plays, many of them high-profile, and I have loved some of them, like Hairspray and the 2016 Broadway revival of The Front Page and the two runs he took at All My Sons, on TV in 1987 and in New York in 2019. (The earlier version, which was released on DVD, is unforgettable.) But his work with a quintet of actors in Ghosts is one of the most staggering evenings I’ve ever spent in the theatre.