Trade Center. He remembers hosting
people from Cantor Fitzgerald. “It was
terrible,” he said. He added that the
coronavirus pandemic poses a differ-
ent kind of challenge, and not only be-
cause of the health risks to his staff:
“We’re very service-driven. The human
touch and connecting with humans
is in our DNA, as with most of the
luxury industry. But we are eliminat-
ing as much of that as possible.” He
sounded a bit rueful, or maybe just
sleep-deprived. He, too, is self-isolat-
ing from family and friends—as well
as from guests and staff. “No more min-
gling,” he said. “It’s all very abstract at
this point.”
Several other city hotels, with Gov-
ernor Andrew Cuomo’s encouragement,
have followed in the Four Seasons’ wake,
including the InterContinental Times
Square, Room Mate Grace, Yotel, and
the Hudson Hotel. (Not the Trump
International, however; as Tauscher
pointed out, it is in a different category,
owing to its many floors of residential
condominiums.) Wythe Hotel, in Wil-
liamsburg, has partnered with N.Y.U.
Langone to house some of that hospi-
tal’s staff. Like Tauscher, Peter Law-
rence, Wythe’s owner, expressed a kind
of existential hotelier’s regret at pres-
ent circumstances. “Hospitality people
solve issues with empathy and kind-
ness, by gathering people together and
cooking for them and caring for them.
And none of our skills are relevant at
the moment; some are even dangerous,”
he wrote in an e-mail. “But we are start-
ing to do our small part now.”
—Bruce Handy
where the musicians look like math teach-
ers,” he said. “They wear total normie
outfits. It’s normie radicalism.” Though
it has since been corrected, “Traditional”
was briefly misspelled on the album’s
cover. “Trad atonal,” Malkmus said. “It
kind of worked.”
Sharlene’s is a few blocks southeast
of Barclays Center, where the Brooklyn
Nets were scheduled to play the Phoe-
nix Suns that night. (Weeks later, the
N.B.A. suspended the season, because
of the coronavirus outbreak, and four
Nets players tested positive for covid-19.)
In the mid-nineties, when alternative
culture was reaching a sarcastic apex,
indie rock and athletics felt fundamen-
tally at odds. (Skateboarding was cool,
but professional, uniform-requiring sports
were too earnest and all-American to be
taken seriously.) As the guitarist and vo-
calist in Pavement, a group that has been
credibly dubbed the greatest indie-rock
band of all time, Malkmus became the
central avatar of the vaguely aloof slacker
aesthetic. Pavement’s music was stylishly
disaffected; its most ardent fans were
bookish outsiders. (The writer Chuck
Klosterman once noted that the band
has “a lot of abstract credibility among
people who get mad at the radio.”) Yet
Malkmus has always been a sports fan.
He is an avid tennis player—he’s two
years away from qualifying for the se-
nior team in his club league—and speaks
about various N.B.A. franchises and
players with casual fluency.
As he headed to the arena, he de-
scribed himself as “post-team.” He wore
a blue sweater, a terry-cloth wristband,
and a Milwaukee Bucks hat. “I started
as a college-basketball fan, because my
father was really into U.C.L.A. They
were a pretty progressive team in terms
of the type of basketball they played.
They dominated the early seventies,” he
said. “Now I come and go. In the last
fifteen years, I realized that if I have to
like a pro sport—well, I don’t have to—I
relate to basketball.” He lives in Port-
land, Oregon, but he does not consider
himself a serious Trail Blazers fan. “I
feel like a person without roots. I’m from
central California, so I used to go to
Sacramento games.” The city’s team, the
Kings, had just moved there. “They came
from Kansas City, and they were not
particularly good. I’m not going to throw
“I got you a rat to remind you of the subway.” my allegiance down,” he said, laughing.1
POSTCARDFROMBEFORE
BASKETBALLBALM
O
n a Monday evening, back when
such places were still open, the singer
and guitarist Stephen Malkmus took a
seat at Sharlene’s, a dive bar on Flatbush
Avenue, in Brooklyn, where happy hour
runs from 1 to 7 p.m. It was just before
the release of “Traditional Techniques,”
the second album that Malkmus, who is
fifty-three, has made without the Jicks,
his longtime backing band, or as a mem-
ber of Pavement, the indie-rock group
he fronted during the nineteen-nineties.
He described the album’s title as “a little
bit ironic.” The phrase was borrowed
from the German philosopher Theodor
Adorno, who, in 1965, characterized the
Beatles’ music as “no more than tradi-
tional techniques in a degraded form.”
“I was a little stoned that day,” Malk-
mus said. “I thought, I’d like to attach
myself to the Frankfurt School. That
makes me seem smart.” The record
features non-Western instrumentation
(rabab, kaval, udu, daf) and borrows from
contemporary African artists, such as the
Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar and the
desert-rock band Tinariwen. The results
are rich, dynamic, and pleasantly warm.
Besides Adorno, the title also alludes to
the folk LPs put out by niche labels such
as Vanguard and Folkways in the eight-
ies. “There’s this cottage industry of labels