The New Yorker articles from January 2003

The New Yorker archives from January 2003

Favorites from our 2002 CD rotation, listed alphabetically.(Sound Recording Review)
January 6, 2003... Beck, "Sea Change" (Interscope)--It's hard for Beck to release a record without reviving the time-honored, and somewhat timeworn, question of his authenticity. Is he an ironist in mannerist's clothing? A mannerist with the heart of a collagist?...

Rappers' Delights.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
January 6, 2003... Hip-hop rose from the streets of the Bronx, offering relief from the crime and poverty of the mid-nineteen-seventies. YES YES Y'ALL: THE EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT ORAL HISTORY OF HIP-HOP'S FIRST DECADE (Da Capo), by Jim Fricke and Charlie...

LEAVING THE CASTLE.
January 6, 2003... The course of power ultimately changes only if there are forces present to oppose it. The Bush Administration, for example, rarely feels the rub of resistance; it is able to justify gratuitous tax breaks, snuggle up to friendly corporations,...

THE LAST GOOD HAIRCUT.
January 6, 2003... Early in December, a sign went up at Michael's Children's Haircutting Salon, on Madison Avenue between Ninetieth and Ninety-first Streets, announcing that three days before New Year's Eve, after ninety-two years of tending to the towheads and...

HATS TO DIE IN.
January 6, 2003... Caryl Churchill's new play, "Far Away," depicts a surreal dystopia, not too far in the future, in which a totalitarian government performs weekly mass executions to the accompaniment of tinny martial music; a global war has escalated so that...

THE REAL JACK ASS.
January 6, 2003... The matter of Jack Ass v. Viacom International Inc. concerns an electrical lineman in Montana named Jack Ass, who stumbled upon the MTV show "Jackass" two years ago and was moved to mark his displeasure with litigation. The other day, in the...

BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING BAND.
January 6, 2003... George Stathos, who describes himself as "the tallest Greek you'll ever meet in your life," is the elegant, lugubrious front man for My Greek Wedding Band, an outfit that, until recently, was known to connubially minded Mediterranean New...

IL DUCE'S PORTRaits.
January 6, 2003... You could say that I spent the first twenty years of my life with Mussolini's face always in view, in the sense that his portrait hung in every classroom as well as in every public building or office I entered. I could, therefore, try to chart...

TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL.(capital punishment)
January 6, 2003... When Joseph Hartzler, a former colleague of mine in the United States attorney's office in Chicago, was appointed the lead prosecutor in the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, he remarked that McVeigh was headed for Hell, no...

SECOND ACT.(ballet dancer Suzanne Farrell)
January 6, 2003... On a November night in 1989, Suzanne Farrell gave her final performance with New York City Ballet, the company that she had joined twenty-eight years earlier. One last time, her hair hung with jewels, she danced the long, strange...

DESIGNING DOWNTOWN.(re-developing the World Trade Center site)
January 6, 2003... The first six proposals for rebuilding the World Trade Center site were unveiled last July, at a press conference in Federal Hall, on Wall Street. John Beyer, of Beyer Blinder Belle, the architectural firm that drew up most of the plans, sat on...

HIGH STYLE.("The Road of Excess")(Book Review)
January 6, 2003... When Oscar Wilde said that J. M. W. Turner had invented sunsets, he was joking, but he wasn't only joking. He meant that Turner had made the sunset into a subject of art, and therefore people were now looking at, talking about, and thinking...

OPERA AS HISTORY.(Opera Review)
January 6, 2003... Opera houses are supposed to be fantasy places, where outlandish lovers meet and villains spiral to their inevitable fates. To present an opera about the Holocaust--as the composer Nicholas Maw has done, with "Sophie's Choice," which recently...

HEARTBURN.(Theater Review)
January 6, 2003... To the playwright George S. Kaufman, sentiment was an otiose emotion that actually made him shiver. He once suggested to Irving Berlin that he change the opening line of his hit "Always" to "I'll be loving you Thursday." Wit was Kaufman's way...

FANTASYLAND.(Movie Review)
January 6, 2003... From 1975, Brendan Gill reviews the original Broadway production of "Chicago" As the opening credits of 2003 begin to roll, two big thunderers are slugging it out. "Chicago" is a musical and "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" is three...

Best Jazz Albums of 2002.(Critical Essay)
January 13, 2003... What keeps a song in a jazz musician's heart these days is anyone's guess. The past few years have seen the major labels all but turn their backs on the genre: the high-profile buzz of Ken Burns's 2001 documentary never translated into solid...

The Man Behind Don Juan.(Lord Byron)(Book Review)(Brief Article)
January 13, 2003... In the summer of 1938, a hundred and fourteen years after Lord Byron's nearly mythic death at Missolonghi, an intrepid vicar at the parish church of Hucknall Torkard and a small band of stalwarts decided to pay a visit to the poet of "Childe...

AXIS PRAXIS.(David Frum and the Bush dicta "Axis of Evil")(Critical Essay)
January 13, 2003... A not completely crazy case can be made that the most influential thinker in the foreign-policy apparatus of the Administration of George W. Bush during its first two years was not one of the familiar members of the gold-shielded Praetorian...

MR. NEXT.(Bill Jones makes the new lines new at Whole Foods Market in Chelsea, New York City)
January 13, 2003... When Bill Jones retired and moved from Philadelphia to Union City, New Jersey, a few years ago, he had no friends nearby, and although he was not lonely, he observed that his social life consisted chiefly of being stopped on the street by...

EGGHEADS IN XXX.(Stanley Donen)(Interview)
January 13, 2003... As far as Stanley Donen is concerned, elegance died in 1959. That was the year he directed Cary Grant in "The Grass Is Greener." "Cary played a titled Englishman, and he was wearing what an earl would wear at night in his country house--a...

THE TASTEMAKERS.(Starbucks, Kodak, etc.)(Company Profile)
January 13, 2003... For much of the twentieth century, coffee was America's drink. A 1939 survey found that ninety-eight per cent of the country's households drank coffee. After the Second World War, consumption rose steadily until the early sixties, when the...

SIX BILLION SHORT.(New York City budget deficit)
January 13, 2003... The Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group funded by some of the city's major businesspeople, describes its goal as "influencing constructive change" in civic life. To this end, it holds periodic seminars and issues papers with titles...

TEEN BEAT.(Itasca, Texas)
January 13, 2003... ITASCA, TEXAS News travels quickly in Itasca, Texas, where, coincidentally, it doesn't have far to go. Itasca has a central Texas location--just off Interstate 35, equally convenient to Fort Worth and Waco--but its sixteen hundred citizens...

THE CHILDREN OF FREETOWN.(amputation atrocities in Sierra Leone's civil war)(Interview)(Critical Essay)
January 13, 2003... Every day, Americans are confronted with news of horrors throughout the world which seem both vividly intimate and impossibly distant; helpless outrage is a characteristic emotion of the global age. On an October afternoon three years ago, a...

FLYING INTO THE LIGHT.(Roden Crater project - light artist James Turrell)(Interview)(Critical Essay)
January 13, 2003... For sheer aesthetic tenacity, nothing beats the saga of James Turrell and the Roden Crater. Since 1974, Turrell's working life has centered on the effort to turn an extinct volcano on the western edge of the Painted Desert, in northern Arizona,...

MODEL LIFE.(fashion photographer Herb Ritts)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
January 13, 2003... Herb Ritts, who died suddenly last month, at the age of fifty, grew famous for photographing the famous (and notorious for pairing strong, nude men in tender embraces). He made his subjects look vulnerable, sensual, and mythic all at once: the...

GLACIER HEAD.(singer - Bjork)(Critical Essay)
January 13, 2003... The thirty-seven-year-old singer and songwriter Bjork titled her fourth solo CD, released in 2001, "Vespertine"--a word used to describe things that flower or flourish in the evening--and, listening to the album, you can almost smell the...

THE LONE SAILOR.(Alvaro Mutis, 'Maqroll el Gaviero' )(Cover Story)
January 13, 2003... A writer's time is hard to waste. The Bogota-born, Brussels-reared, Mexico City-dwelling poet and prose writer Alvaro Mutis, obliged to make a living, must have often rued the many hours he spent travelling to drab ports and shaking strange...

department of hostility.(typographic error)(Brief Article)
January 13, 2003... Just as the guests sat down to dinner Mr. Mesnier began pitting them with his homemade cherry pitter made of cork and a coat hanger. From the Times.

HARMONIC CONVERGENCE.("The Time of Our Singing" )(Critical Essay)
January 13, 2003... In some artists--James Merrill and Milan Kundera, for instance--the inborn human structure-making impulse heats to fever, yielding works that reflect intense private struggles for equilibrium. Among our younger novelists, no one better...

ART HOUSES.(Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany - museum design/architecture)(Critical Essay)
January 13, 2003... The new Pinakothek der Moderne, in Munich, is a museum that has been strenuously designed for looking at art. This makes it unusual among recently built museums, where what is on display often feels incidental to symbolic functions of the sort...

NOCTURNES.("The Pianist")(Critical Essay)
January 13, 2003... Scenes from a recurring nightmare: families gathered in an enormous yard, ignorant of where they are going and fearing the worst; bewildered strangers at the edges of a crowd muttering to themselves; despairing attempts to save a treasured...

The most distinctive disks of 2002.(classical sound recordings)(Buyers Guide)
January 20, 2003... "Rimsky-Korsakov: Sheherazade" (Philips)--Rimsky-Korsakov's sensuous masterpiece has never lacked for great interpreters, but this opulent new recording, with Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra in top form, has a sweep that sets it apart;...

Buy and Buy.('I Want That!' and 'All My Life For Sale')(Book Review)(Brief Article)
January 20, 2003... In ancient Rome, artisans sold luxury goods at their clients' homes; during the seventies, Bloomingdale's deliberately confused its customers with disorganized merchandise displays. "For better and worse, it is impossible today to imagine a...

DIVIDENDS.(analysis of Pres. Bush's tax reduction proposal)
January 20, 2003... The current Administration likes its initiatives faith-based, and there has never been much secret about which faith constitutes the base. "Christ," Governor George W. Bush replied during a 1999 primary debate, when asked to name his favorite...

NOTHING BUT THE BEST.(private school in New York hires Chef Bobo)
January 20, 2003... No one is saying that the hiring of Chef Bobo by the Calhoun School, on the Upper West Side, was an intentionally provocative gesture, but clearly it puts the onus on Manhattan's other private schools to respond. Would you prefer that your...

SOLD SEPARATELY.(man's collection of board games auctioned)
January 20, 2003... Sid Sackson, in his 1975 book "Beyond Tic Tac Toe," wrote, "Games mean many things to many people; to me, they are an art form of great potential beauty." If so, Sackson, who died late last year, at the age of eighty-two, was a prodigious and...

NO FLAG ON THE PLAY.(controversy over proceduralism and substance, as shown by end of football playoff game between New York Giants and San Francisco 49ers)
January 20, 2003... Stanley Fish, the Milton scholar, critical provocateur, and dean at the University of Illinois-Chicago, sometimes tells an old story about the legendary major-league umpire Bill Klem. He uses it to illustrate a point about postmodernist...

YEE HAW.(relaunch of comic book, 'Rawhide Kid')
January 20, 2003... The walls of Axel Alonso's office at Marvel Comics are covered with illustrations, but the one that first catches the eye is a cover for the upcoming relaunch of "Rawhide Kid." The Kid, who debuted in 1955 but went dormant in 1979, is looking...

LOCAL BOUNTY.(takeout food in San Francisco, California and Manhattan, New York)
January 20, 2003... Although a grandparent who arrives on the scene after the birth of a child is traditionally pictured cooking dinner for sleep-deprived parents or stuffing the freezer with casseroles, I can tell you that these days it's mostly takeout. That is...

TRUTH IN ARCHITECTURE.(architect Moshe Safdie)(Interview)
January 20, 2003... Moshe Safdie is an architect who dislikes artistry. This is not to say that he objects to frills and curlicues, although, being an old-style modernist, he disapproves of those, too. His position is more extreme. In his first book, "Beyond...

READING MINDS.(brain-computer interface research)
January 20, 2003... One Friday morning last July, Niels Birbaumer, a neuroscientist from the University of Tubingen, in southern Germany, was driven from his hotel in the center of Lima, Peru, to a house protected by a half-dozen armed guards in a gated suburban...

REFUGEE.(life of one Afghan refugee in England)
January 20, 2003... The burka wasn't the first or the last of Afsana's disguises, only the one you would have noticed the most, and, in the event, she left her burka in Afghanistan. When the Dover police found her wandering up the A2 at four in the morning, three...

PHILLIS WHEATLEY ON TRIAL.(African American writer and poet Phillis Wheatley had to prove she wrote the works attributed to her)
January 20, 2003... A guide to Web sites about early African-American writers It was the primal scene of African-American letters. Sometime before October 8, 1772, Phillis Wheatley, a slim African slave in her late teens who was a published poet, met with...

GLORIOUS FOOD.('The Passionate Epicure')(Book Review)
January 20, 2003... In a small town in eastern France in the eighteen-thirties, the nation's most celebrated gastronome, Dodin-Bouffant, mourns the death of his cook. Alongside him are his three favorite dining companions, equally bereaved by the passing of the...

WESTERN EXPOSURE.('Everwood')(Television Program Review)
January 20, 2003... Now that the phrase "jump the shark" has entered the culture and given us a name for the point at which a TV series has peaked and starts heading downhill--the phrase is a reference to the episode of "Happy Days" when Fonzie, for some reason,...

TROUBLE IN THE STREETS.('City of God' and 'Divine Intervention')(Movie Review)
January 20, 2003... There was a lot of noise about "City of God" when it played at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and it now bursts into America waving a fully loaded nomination for the Golden Globes. I don't envy the judges for Best Foreign Language Film,...

City Lights.('The Architecture of Landscape, 1940-1960' and 'Urban Landscapes')(Book Review)(Brief Article)
January 27, 2003... As New Yorkers consider their choices for a reimagined downtown skyline, two new books take helpful looks at the urban milieu. THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANDSCAPE, 1940-1960 (Pennsylvania), edited by Marc Treib, presents the city as an organism,...

WHAT'S UP, DOC?(The New York Times uses Dr. as its title in front of Senator Bill Frist's name, which is a sign of respect )
January 27, 2003... The recent coup in the big marble palace on Capitol Hill turns out to have been a two-parter. Part One everybody knows about: just before Christmas, Trent Lott, of Mississippi, was forced out as the Republican leader of the Senate and replaced...

THE CODE.(ethics code for 'The New York Times' journalists)
January 27, 2003... Speaking of the Times, fourteen years ago, when Steven Crist was covering horse racing for the paper, Sports Illustrated ran a photograph of him posing at a wagering window fumbling with a wad of cash. Crist liked to play the horses as well as...

TOO HOT TO HOOT.(comic Demetri Martin)
January 27, 2003... Demetri Martin is a dark-eyed twenty-nine-year-old from the Jersey Shore with a mop of black hair and a forceful nose. He is a palindromist, an anagrammatist, an amateur inventor, and, most visibly these days, an ascendant comedian. (He has...

WIND SHIFT.(Long Island Power Authority seeks developer for wind-energy farm)
January 27, 2003... It's easy to sell a lot of things in New York, but for a while now it's been very difficult to sell wind, which is to say electricity that comes from giant, futuristic-looking windmills. This is a little surprising, given that (1) there is an...

THE CULTURE EXCUSE.(how differences in corporate culture affected the merger of Time Warner and America Online )
January 27, 2003... From the moment, three years ago, that America Online and Time Warner announced that they were merging, pundits and analysts warned that the biggest difficulty facing the new company was an inevitable "clash of cultures": unfettered New Economy...

SPEECHLEss.(furor caused by invitation to poet Tom Paulin to speak at Harvard University and ramifications on students at Harvard Law School)
January 27, 2003... At the beginning of November, Rita Goldberg was among the members of the Harvard academic community to receive a routine e-mail announcement of a poetry reading--not, at first glance, the sort of thing to reawaken the somewhat musty issue of...

THE COLD TEST.(report on nuclear weapons development programs of North Korea and Pakistan)
January 27, 2003... From 1994, Ian Buruma on Kim Jong Il. Last June, four months before the current crisis over North Korea became public, the Central Intelligence Agency delivered a comprehensive analysis of North Korea's nuclear ambitions to President Bush...

HIS BODY, HIMSELF.(Matthew Barney, multimedia, Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York)
January 27, 2003... In today's somewhat somnolent art world, an artist who brings what Victor Hugo once described as a "new shudder" runs the risk of immediate and unthinking acclaim. Matthew Barney encountered this at his New York debut, in 1991, when crowds...

THE OLD MAN AND THE GUN.(life of bank robber Forrest Tucker)
January 27, 2003... Just before Forrest Tucker turned seventy-nine, he went to work for the last time. Although he was still a striking-looking man, with intense blue eyes and swept-back white hair, he had a growing list of ailments, including high blood pressure...

HONEST, DECENT, WRONG.(writings of George Orwell)
January 27, 2003... Louis Menand discusses George Orwell and his legacy "Animal Farm," George Orwell's satire, which became the Cold War "Candide," was finished in 1944, the high point of the Soviet-Western alliance against fascism. It was a warning against...

MEN BEHAVING BADLY.('She Stoops to Conquer' and 'The Talking Cure')(Theater Review)
January 27, 2003... In print, Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) was some kind of literary star; in life, he was some kind of clown. His erudition won him the company of the era's great men--Dr. Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Edmund Burke among them. But the...

MEN ON EDGE.('Narc' and 'The Recruit')(Movie Review)
January 27, 2003... Exceptionally handsome actors may become semi-passive narcissists (Tyrone Power, the young Richard Gere) or bashful charmers (Gary Cooper, Robert Redford). Or they may become strategic hipsters, exploiting their looks while maintaining a core...