C4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020CLUE OF THE DAY
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FAMILIAR PHRASES ART
ORIGINALLY A FOLK
TERM FOR A CHRONIC
RASH, THIS PHRASE
GOT A NEW MEANING
AS A TITLE FOR A 1952
STAGE COMEDY &
LATER A MOVIEFriday’s Response:
WHAT IS BERMUDA?Pop critics for The New York
Times weigh in on notable new
songs.
Beyoncé
BLACK PARADE
.....................................................................
Beyoncé released “Black Parade”
on Juneteenth, and it makes ambi-
tious, far-reaching connections.
The lyrics allude to black Ameri-
can achievement, culture and
struggle, to African history and
deities, to the power of women,
and to this month’s protests:
“Rubber bullets bouncin’ off me/
Made a picket sign off your picket
fence/Take it as a warning.” The
music pulls its own connections —
to trap electronics, African songs,
brass bands, gospel choirs —
while Beyoncé flaunts new melo-
dy ideas in each verse. Voices
gather around her, as her solo
strut turns into a parade, or a
more purposeful march: “Put
your fists up in the air/Show black
love,” she insists.
JON PARELES
Dinner Party
featuring Phoelix
FREEZE TAG. ...................................................................
Dinner Party is the alliance of the
producers and musicians 9th
Wonder, Terrace Martin, Kamasi
Washington and Robert Glasper.
Phoelix joins them to sing “Freeze
Tag,” about an all-too-common
scenario: “They told me put my
hands up behind my head/I think
they got the wrong one,” he re-
counts in a high, gentle croon.
“Then they told me if I move, they
gon’ shoot me dead.” The music is
quiet-storm R&B, complete with
wind chimes, but as the chord
progression circles and Phoelix
sings the verse again and again,
the fraught, frozen moment grows
harrowing.
JON PARELESSun Ra Arkestra
SEDUCTIVE FANTASY. ...................................................................
More than 25 years after Sun Ra’s
death, the Afrofuturist pioneer’s
ensemble continues to uphold his
legacy in performances around
the world, but it hasn’t released a
studio album of new music in two
decades. That will change later
this year. The first single from the
Arkestra’s forthcoming LP is
“Seductive Fantasy,” a slow-
moving, blood-pumping vamp
that first appeared on the 1979
album “On Jupiter.” On the new
version, the first sound you hear
is the steady baritone saxophone
line of Danny Ray Thompson,
who played on the original too; he
died just months after this newer
recording was made. Across a
quick four minutes, saxophones
carry a simple melody, then join
up with the reeds to make a
messy gouache of harmonies
while Marshall Allen’s alto saxo-
phone nearly flies off the handle,
squealing its way toward liftoff.
GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOCharlie Puth
GIRLFRIEND. ...................................................................
Some pleasant falsetto funk from
Charlie Puth, a formalist with a
lithe voice and a cloying demean-
or. “Baby would you ever want to
be my girlfriend?” he coos. “I
don’t want to play no games/this
is more than just a phase.” It’s
effective, but perhaps not quite as
catchy as his recent commercials
for Subway.
JON CARAMANICAThe Chicks
MARCH MARCH. ...................................................................
The Chicks — they have dropped
Dixie in this moment of rejecting
references to the Civil War-era
South — are a long way from
traditional country in “March
March” from their coming album,
“Gaslighter.” The initial beat is an
electronic thump and blip, and the
lyrics are topical and sometimes
profane, praising the teenage
activists who are demanding gun
control and environmental action:
“Watching our youth have to
solve our problems/I’m standing
with them, who’s coming with
me?” sings Natalie Maines. Fid-
dle and banjo do arrive, but the
song sends a message for right
now.
JON PARELES
THE PLAYLISTThe Moment Can Be Heard in the Latest Releases
Beyoncé’s new song is
purposeful, and full of allusions
to achievement and struggle.KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGESMs. Donhauser, who makes $371,000 in sal-
ary, said she and the museum’s deputy di-
rector had both taken pay cuts of 35 percent.
Ms. Donhauser summed up the financial
situation in an email last month to the staff.
“With the closing of the Museum,” she
wrote, “came the loss of all of our major
streams of income, including admissions,
venue rentals, and important fund-raising
events.” To address this, she continued,
costs were cut in “all areas of the Museum
— staff, exhibition and education program-
ming, collections and building operations.”
Museum officials said it incurred a deficit
of $1.9 million this year and faces a possible
deficit next year as well. A museum spokes-
woman, Meryl Cooper, said this year’s
deficit was addressed by part of a $1.7 mil-
lion federal Paycheck Protection Program
loan that the museum hopes to turn into a
grant and by about $850,000 from the en-
dowment. The museum has also received
additional financial help from the New York
Community Trust and the Terra Foundation
for American Art.
Though the museum has often operated
with tight margins, Ms. Donhauser said she
believed it would emerge from the pan-
demic in good shape.
“I do feel confident,” she said. “I do be-
lieve that the museum is in a solid place.”
When the city museum was founded in
1923, its mission overlapped in some ways
with that of the older New-York Historical
Society. At points there was talk about
merging the two institutions, but they have
remained independent and on opposite
sides of Central Park, with the city museum,
on Fifth Avenue between 103rd and 104th
Streets, concentrating exclusively on his-
tory within the five boroughs.
Although the museum’s name makes it
sound a bit like a municipal entity, it is run
by a private nonprofit. It does receive some
funding from the city’s Department of Cul-
tural Affairs and is housed in a city-owned
building
The city museum, panned years ago by
some as too staid in its programming, was
widely seen as having become more ener-
getic in the 2000s. Exhibitions, including
one that detailed the physical transforma-
tion of New York by Robert Moses and an-
other that featured tens of thousands of vin-
tage photographs of the city, drew interna-
tional attention.
In 2011 the museum was secure enough to
take over the operations of the beleaguered
South Street Seaport Museum, using a $2
million grant from the Lower Manhattan
Development Corporation. But that ar-
rangement dissolved two years later after
Hurricane Sandy caused serious damage to
the Seaport museum and the city museum’s
board decided to concentrate on its own af-
fairs.
Ms. Donhauser was named the directorin 2015 and in 2017 the Thompson Family
Foundation donated $10 million to the mu-
seum, its biggest gift ever. The museum’s
endowment is now at $27 million, she said,
up from about $9 million a few years ago.
The museum’s annual budget has hov-
ered around $15 million for most of the last
several years, but Ms. Donhauser said that
it was projected to be about $11.5 million for
the fiscal year beginning in July.
There were also bright spots. While the
museum has been closed it has drawn large
audiences for its online programming,
which includes a series called “Curators
From the Couch,” featuring talks with art-
ists and others, and “Covid Stories,” which
has collected more than 4,000 photographs
and accounts documenting a socially dis-
tanced city.
Among the possibilities being discussed
at the museum, Ms. Donhauser said, are on-
line adult education courses on New York
topics that could cost around $20 for a se-ries. Those might be accompanied by a
reading list, she said, as well as online con-
versations moderated by curators.
Meanwhile, she and others were starting
to think about the museum’s reopening,
which is planned for July 23 if the city con-
tinues to progress in stemming the coro-
navirus. Curators are now preparing a fall
exhibition to be called “New York Re-
sponds: Beyond Covid.”
A model for that sort of exhibition could
be the 2018 show “Germ City,” which exam-
ined epidemics in the city including the 1918
flu epidemic that killed more than 20,000
people.
“There are a lot of challenges ahead of us
but there is also a great opportunity to
present the complexities of New York,” Ms.
Donhauser said. “We have the curatorial
expertise and knowledge to present a very
nuanced discussion about what the city is
going through.”CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMESA City Museum Struggles and Hopes
CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
Top, the Museum of the City
of New York’s Fifth Avenue
home. Above: left, the
statue of Alexander
Hamilton outside the
museum follows the advice
of health officials. Right,
Whitney Donhauser, the
museum’s director, tours an
exhibit with Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar.CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES KRISTA SCHLUETER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES