The New Yorker articles from August 2006

The New Yorker archives from August 2006

JAZZ NOTES.(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... HIS WAY -- In the mid-seventies, when the brassman Warren Vache arrived on the New York scene straight out of Rahway, New Jersey, he and his sometime associate the saxophonist Scott Hamilton became eager poster boys for traditional jazz,...

TABLES FOR TWO.
August 7, 2006... TURKS & FROGS TRIBECA -- 458 Greenwich St. (212-966-4774)--Brother acts are winsome but notoriously volatile--for every genial Wilson, there's a whiny Gallagher or a warring Teitelbaum. So, when the Cakir boys set to work on Turks & Frogs...

THE "IC" FACTOR.(The Talk of the Town)
August 7, 2006... What is the name of a certain political party in the United States--not the one which controls the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government but the other one, which doesn't? The question is a small one, to be...

UNSAFE AT ANY PRICE.(The Talk of the Town)
August 7, 2006... A couple of weeks ago, the Senate Appropriations Committee did something unusual: it actually said no to the Defense Department, trimming next year's requested defense budget by a small amount. In practice, the cuts will likely be quashed by...

THE BATTLE FOR LEBANON.
August 7, 2006... On a deceptively peaceful afternoon in the last week of July, Ali Fayyad, a Hezbollah strategist, puffed on a cigar and spooned up a dish of ice cream. Three scoops: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. We were sitting in Lina's Cafe, on Rue...

AMATEUR HOUR.
August 7, 2006... On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development--not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of...

LATE WORKS.(William Shakespeare)
August 7, 2006... Last words, recorded and treasured in the days when the deathbed was in the home, have fallen from fashion, perhaps because most people spend their final hours in the hospital, too drugged to make any sense. And only the night nurse hears them...

SAM I AM.
August 7, 2006... "We're not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?" one character asks another in Samuel Beckett's 1958 play "Endgame." It turns out to be a well-warranted concern. Beckett's writings constitute probably the most significant body of work...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(A Disorder Peculiar to the Country)(The Brambles)(Simon Bolivar)(The Prince of the Marshes)(Book review)
August 7, 2006... A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus (Ecco; $24.95). Like their country, Marshall and Joyce Harriman, a Brooklyn Heights couple, are at war. They are one year into an impossibly bitter divorce, and their hatred for one another has...

FULL BORE.(musical group The Boredoms)(Concert review)
August 7, 2006... Yamataka Eye has been leading the Japanese band the Boredoms for almost twenty years. His work as a front man, manipulator of light bulbs, and vocalist (singer would not be the right word) places him in a tradition that includes the jazz...

WHAT IF.(Conversations with Other Women)(13 Tzameti)(Movie review)
August 7, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File What do Napoleon Bonaparte, Doris Day, and the Incredible Hulk have in common, apart from the fact that they all look great in pink? One answer is that each has been deemed worthy of a split image. Abel...

DVD NOTEs.
August 21, 2006... SMOOTH OPERATOR -- The four feature films that Eric Rohmer directed between 1966 and 1972, "La Collectionneuse," "My Night at Maud's," "Claire's Knee," and "Love in the Afternoon," brought him international renown, based largely on their...

TABLES FOR TWO.
August 21, 2006... CREMA -- 111 W. 17th St. (212-691-4477)--Julieta Ballesteros made her name as the chef at Mexicana Mama, a tiny restaurant in the Village whose homey atmosphere belied the sophistication of the cooking. Her new spot, in Chelsea, is swankier,...

SNAKE EYES.(The Talk of the Town)
August 21, 2006... On February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite, the longtime anchorman of the CBS Evening News and the gruff but kindly voice of what was then called Middle America, signed off his broadcast on an unusual note. Freshly returned from Vietnam, where the...

EVERY LAST DROP.(The Talk of the Town)
August 21, 2006... "Do you get nervous about flying?" a man asked two women seated next to him, as they waited by the arrival gate at Kennedy Airport's Terminal 7, last Thursday afternoon. "You know, it's safer than any other form of transportation," he said....

THE VINEYARD FRACTURE.(The Talk of the Town)
August 21, 2006... Even the leisure class has its occupational hazards: tennis elbow, hangovers, red tide, gout. The Palm Beach diarrhea outbreak of 1996 was the result of a bad crop of raspberries; a few weeks ago, off the coast of Bermuda, a sportfisherman was...

BAD-ASS CAMERA.(The Talk of the Town)
August 21, 2006... Three years ago, the artist Clifford Ross unveiled the R1, a still camera of his own design and construction--a Rube Goldberg assemblage of cadged and commissioned parts. Although it used film, it captured far more detail than any other camera,...

THE COOPER'S TALE.(The Talk of the Town)
August 21, 2006... It is hereby noted that a cooper---a maker of wooden buckets, tubs, butter churns, and, above all, barrels--came to town a few weeks ago from Williamsburg, Virginia, for purposes of "cross-promotion," a distinctly modern concept that is...

WATCHING LEBANON.
August 21, 2006... In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. "It's a moment of...

BLANK MONDAY.(Gordon Clark's decision to shut down surfboard manufacturer Clark Foam in wake of foreign competition)
August 21, 2006... Gordon (Grubby) Clark did not invent the modern surfboard. It just began to seem that way, as the decades passed and his company, Clark Foam, of Laguna Niguel, California, founded in 1961, came to dominate the production of the...

THE LOST YEAR.(New Orleans one year after Hurricane Katrina)
August 21, 2006... The downriver side of New Orleans has always evoked strong emotions. The French avoided it, settling the high ground of a Mississippi River oxbow that would become the heart of the city. The Americans, who took over in 1803, reviled it as a...

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.(the art of conducting symphony orchestras)
August 21, 2006... The American conductor Robert Spano raised his eyebrows and his baton, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra dug into a smoky, "Bolero"-like dance. He was nearing the end of two tense and fatiguing days of recording a new opera, "Ainadamar," in...

ON DUTY.(World Trade Center)(Movie review)
August 21, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File The Port Authority cops in Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" emerge at first light from their houses in Clifton, New Jersey, and Goshen, New York, and head for the city. As other officers make their way...

THE PHILOSOPHER STONED.(drug use of literary critic Walter Benjamin considered)
August 21, 2006... On December 18, 1927, at three-thirty in the morning, Walter Benjamin began writing a memorandum titled "Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish." It is characteristic of Benjamin that the first fact he thought it necessary to record...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Dissident)(The Keep)(The Conquest of Nature)(Brief article)(Book review)
August 21, 2006... The Dissident, by Nell Freudenberger (Ecco; $25.95). This beguiling first novel centers on a Chinese performance artist and former political prisoner, who travels to Los Angeles to accept a teaching fellowship at a prestigious girls' school....

WORLD STAGE.(Israel's foremost dance company: Batsheva)(Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder)(Dance review)
August 21, 2006... Israel is a young country, in an emergency. One might therefore expect from its dance companies a certain straightforwardness, a willingness to put on shows about what life is like and how we should feel about it. But in the three Israeli...

WHAT NEXT?(The Greater Good)(Our Town)(Opera review)
August 21, 2006... July was New American Opera Month in the purple hills of upstate New York and western Massachusetts. You could hardly drive your Smart car from the lesbian bed-and-breakfast to the organic farm stand without running over an adaptation of a...

TABLES FOR TWO.
August 28, 2006... SFOGLIA -- 1402 Lexington Ave., at 92nd St. (212-831-1402)--The northwest corner of Ninety-second Street and Lexington Avenue is one of those restaurant Bermuda Triangles. Cafe Lex, Lex 92, and La Collina have perished there, unfortunate...

READ IT AND WEEP.(The Talk of the Town)
August 28, 2006... Summer reading lists are meant both for self-improvement and to impress an audience. That boy reading Proust on the beach has an eye for the girl nearby turning the pages of Virginia Woolf as much as he does for his own vow to get to the end of...

UP AND AWAY.(The Talk of the Town)
August 28, 2006... Beate Liepert is an atmospheric physicist at Columbia University. She has trouble telling left from right--a result, she thinks, of being forced, as a young girl in Bavaria, to write with her right hand. Now she's ambidextrous, and can read...

GIGI IN JERSEY.(The Talk of the Town)
August 28, 2006... The actress Leslie Caron, whom Gene Kelly plucked, in 1948, when she was seventeen, from the Ballets des Champs-Elysees and then shipped to Hollywood, where she pirouetted and pouted her way through several M-G-M classics, has grown accustomed,...

TEAR, SLAP, CLACK.(The Talk of the Town)
August 28, 2006... Shortly before sunrise on a summer Tuesday, a truck left a warehouse in Rockville, Maryland. It travelled a mile to a post office. The driver backed up to a loading dock, where fifteen mail carts awaited him. The carts were stacked with boxes...

PRIVATE LIES.(The Talk of the Town)
August 28, 2006... In the late nineteen-nineties, every bright young entrepreneur with a startup was dying to take his company public. In a time of generous stock options and irrationally optimistic markets, I.P.O.s seemed to offer a reliable road to riches. But...

THE RISK POOL.
August 28, 2006... The years just after the Second World War were a time of great industrial upheaval in the United States. Strikes were commonplace. Workers moved from one company to another. Runaway inflation was eroding the value of wages. In the uncertain...

PETRIFIED.
August 28, 2006... In February, 1995, the thirty-seven-year-old British actor and comedian Stephen Fry was starring with another popular British comic, Rik Mayall, in the West End production of Simon Gray's "Cell Mates." Fry had the role of George Blake, a spy...

UPPIE REDUX?
August 28, 2006... A hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair, the muckraker and socialist, brought out "The Jungle," a sensationally grim expose of the noisome squalors and dangers of the meatpacking industry. Dedicated to "the workingmen of America," the book became...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Special Topics in Calamity Physics)(The Whistling Season)(The Wonga Coup)(The Human Voice)(Book review)
August 28, 2006... Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (Viking; $25.95). The first hundred pages of this wildly idiosyncratic debut novel are a blizzard of obscure bibliographical references, apocrypha, Capitalized Words of Import, and nouns...

MILE-HIGH.
August 28, 2006... Daniel Libeskind's architectural career has had an unusual trajectory. He went from being a theoretician whose highly academic designs were so obscure that most people couldn't understand them to being a celebrity architect whose work is...

GOING EAST.
August 28, 2006... The present sorrows of Beirut call to mind an underknown legacy of that city's last spell of ruin and its history of cosmopolitan ferment--the Dahesh Museum, a sleek institution in the I.B.M. Building, on Madison Avenue at Fifty-seventh Street,...

BORDERLINES.
August 28, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File Things are going well for Matt Dillon, which is more than you can say for Henry Chinaski. Henry is the man whom Dillon plays in "Factotum." As the title implies, Henry has never been blessed--or...