The New Yorker articles from July 2003

The New Yorker archives from July 2003

Giving Direction.('Conversations with Peter Brook, 1970-2000')('The Crafty Art of Playmaking')(Book Review)
July 7, 2003... Margaret Croyden's Conversations with Peter Brook, 1970-2000 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) addresses the work of the man who's been called "the most important contemporary theatre director in the West." When Brook founded the International Center...

NORTHERN LIGHT.
July 7, 2003... The Fourth of July is one of the best holidays around: fireworks that get better every year, no gift-giving hassles, not too much commercial exploitation, nice weather (usually), no religious test for participation. And, no doubt, throwing off...

THE JONATHAN ZIZMORS.
July 7, 2003... Among the innovations with which patrons of the New York City subway system have recently been faced--rising fares, the puzzling and unsatisfying introduction of the V line--perhaps the most startling are the new advertisements for the...

SOME PLANT.
July 7, 2003... For fifty years, the Agave americana at the New York Botanical Garden's Enid A. Haupt Conservatory led an exemplary, if somewhat artificial, life. Five feet high and ten feet across, the specimen would occasionally drop one of its fleshy,...

LEADING THE BLIND.(New York named one of top four cities for blind )
July 7, 2003... New York was named one of the top four cities to live in by the American Foundation for the Blind the other day, and, in honor of the official bestowal of an A.F.B. Livable Community Award, there was a re-creation of the very first time a guide...

WHAT AILS US.
July 7, 2003... Forgive American consumers if they feel a bit perplexed. Policymakers and pundits have been warning them about the prospect of deflation (a prolonged and widespread decline in prices), but there's no sign of any decline in many of the prices...

UNDERWATER.(Three Gorges Dam project )
July 7, 2003... Peter Hessler discusses the repercussions of the Three Gorges Dam project JUNE 7, 2003 -- At six-thirteen in the evening, after the Zhou family has already moved their television, a desk, two tables, and five chairs onto a pumpkin...

WEST SIDE FIXER-UPPER.(Lincoln Center )
July 7, 2003... In the mid-fifties, when Robert Moses came up with the idea of Lincoln Center--a performing-arts complex that would make the depressed West Side of Manhattan respectable and provide the impetus for large-scale urban renewal--most of the city's...

THE MONEY NOTE.(recording industry)(Company Profile)
July 7, 2003... When he was a teen-ager, growing up in New York City in the nineteen-seventies, Jason Flom wrote songs, sang, and played guitar for two rock bands, which he named Relative Pleasure and Selective Service. But Flom's dreams of rock stardom ended...

A SUDDEN ILLNESS.(Short Story)
July 7, 2003... We were in Linc's car, an aging yellow Mercedes sedan, big and steady, with slippery blond seats and a deep, strumming idle. Lincoln called it Dr. Diesel. It was a Sunday night, March 22, 1987, nine-thirty. Rural Ohio was a smooth continuity of...

HATE AND HEDONISM.('Platform')(Book Review)
July 7, 2003... In 1998, I was one of the judges of the Prix Novembre, in Paris: a prize given, as its name implies, late in the literary season. After the Goncourt had got it wrong, and after stumblebum efforts by other prizes to correct the Goncourt's...

MOVERS AND SHAKERS.('Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music')(Book Review)
July 7, 2003... In the summer of 1974, after nearly twenty years of one-night stands, sluggish record sales, and the complications inherent in maintaining a variety of hair styles, George Clinton, a thirty-three-year-old former barber from Plainfield, New...

MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION.('Monk')(Television Program Review)
July 7, 2003... The USA Network, let's face it, isn't anyone's go-to channel, but, still, I find it strange that not a single person has mentioned its show "Monk" to me in the year since it began. The series, which stars Tony Shalhoub, became so popular so...

LOCAL STORIES.('His Girl Friday')(Theater Review)
July 7, 2003... In his excellent first season as artistic director of London's Royal National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner has continued the recent company policy of offering safe haven to the best of America's theatrical talent. In this instance--in an adaptation...

MILD IN THE STREETS.('The Hulk')('Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle')(Movie Review)
July 7, 2003... When Fay Wray was hoisted into the air by the love-struck ape in the original "King Kong," from 1933, she screamed and screamed in terror. Or was it excitement? There was a touch of lewd humor in the Merian C. Cooper-Ernest B. Schoedsack...

Matters of Taste.(Book Review)
July 14, 2003... "It's hard to understand how something that tastes sweet in one person's mouth, in another person's mouth can taste so bitter," a friend tells Abe Opincar, whose memoir, Fried Butter (Soho), explores the ways in which memory dictates gustatory...

AFRICA CALLING.
July 14, 2003... As President Bush ventures into Africa, a passage from the opening pages of V. S. Naipaul's novel "A Bend in the River" comes to mind. It's the moment when the narrator, Salim, after driving for days from the East African coast into the...

THE WAY WE ARE.
July 14, 2003... If, in years to come, an average New Yorker is asked to recall the most newsworthy events of June, 2003, he or she will probably be stumped. The biggest story in town was the record-breaking rainfall, which, though significant in the context of...

LUNCH WITH AGNES.(Agnes Martin)
July 14, 2003... Agnes Martin, the Saskatchewan-born Abstract Expressionist painter--a contemporary of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Barnett Newman--whose tranquil paintings are in the Whitney, the Guggenheim, moma, and other museums, abandoned New York a...

NINE FEET UNDER.
July 14, 2003... The big perk in being able to trace your ancestry to an owner of the New York Marble Cemetery, the city's oldest nonsectarian public burial place, behind the Provenzano-Lanza Funeral Home, off Second Avenue above Second Street (not to be...

PATENT BENDING.
July 14, 2003... The American newspaper business as we know it was born on September 3, 1833, when a twenty-three-year-old publisher named Benjamin Day put out the first edition of the New York Sun. Whereas other papers sold for five or six cents, the Sun cost...

THE PROFESSOR OF BASEBALL.(statistician Bill James)
July 14, 2003... The Boston Red Sox really want to beat the Yankees. The team's president and C.E.O., Larry Lucchino, has declared the Yanks an "evil empire," and the principal owner, John Henry, speaks of being "destined to knock off Goliath." Last winter,...

FAJITA JUSTICE.(San Francisco Police Department scandal)
July 14, 2003... Jeffrey Toobin discusses police corruption The Bus Stop Saloon, in San Francisco, has pool tables, a pair of video-golf machines, more than half a dozen televisions, and free popcorn. It also has a prime corner location on Union Street,...

BENEATH THE SAND.
July 14, 2003... The dead camel was lying in a minefield surrounded by barbed wire. From forty or fifty yards away, which was the closest I could get, it looked like a pile of dirty rags in the desert, but when the wind blew in my direction the odor was...

METAL GURU.("Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines")(Movie Review)
July 14, 2003... Here is the plot of "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," released back in 1991: a Terminator arrives from the future with a mission to protect John Connor, who is fated to grow up and lead the human resistance movement against the onslaught of...

ROCK 101.
July 14, 2003... From 1944, part one of "The Hot Bach," Richard O. Boyer's Profile of Duke Ellington Duke Ellington once had to field a barrage of questions from an Icelandic music student who was determined to penetrate to the heart of the genius of jazz....

FIGHTING WORDS.(Book Review)
July 14, 2003... Read Chapter 5 of "Living History" There are two abiding mysteries about Bill Clinton: Why do some people hate him so passionately? And why do some people adore him so loyally? The recent memoirs by his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and by...

American Politics.(books about political history of U.S.)(Book Review)
July 14, 2003... A Leap in the Dark, by John Ferling (Oxford; $30). This deft account of the American struggle for independence dispels the aura of inevitability that usually surrounds such histories by beginning its narrative not on the verge of the Revolution...

THE SHOCK OF THE OLD.(art exhibitions)
July 14, 2003... What is a virtuoso? The answer is provided by a disfigured hand, one of the many spellbinding images that appear in the sleeper show of the summer, the Hendrick Goltzius exhibition at the Met. Who was Goltzius? He was this hand: tendons fused,...

Agent XX7.(Book Review)
July 28, 2003... The image of the seductive female agent frightened and fascinated people even before Mata Hari faced a French firing squad, in 1917. Not only did it tap into fears about women's treachery, but it distinguished between the...

FAITH-BASED INTELLIGENCE.(assertion made in President Bush's state of union)
July 28, 2003... "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." So said President Bush on January 28th, outlining the case for war with Iraq in his State of the Union address. It was...

BLACKBALLED BY BUSH.(Pierre Schori)
July 28, 2003... The unlikely shared enemy of the Bush Administration and Robert Mugabe's regime, in Zimbabwe, it turns out, is a soft-spoken sixty-four-year-old Swedish diplomat who rides around Manhattan in a Saab, socializes with George Soros, and holds a...

REUNION.('The Boys of 2nd Street Park')(Television Program Review)
July 28, 2003... Forty years ago, Steve Satin and Madelyne Klein fell in love on a roller coaster, the Coney Island Cyclone. Before long, they were Steve-and-Maddy, the golden couple of Lincoln High, where she sang in musicals and he was co-captain of the...

SKIN DEEP.(new downtown theatre production 'Pieces (of Ass))
July 28, 2003... "Mamacita,"?"tentpole,"?"Madonna with meatballs,"?"a li'l bit of all right": these are among the many synonyms for "hot chick" offered in a film clip that introduces "Pieces (of Ass)," a new downtown theatre production about so-called...

THE SYRIAN BET.(the Niger uranium controversy )
July 28, 2003... Seymour M. Hersh's March 31st article on the Niger uranium controversy On the night of June 18th, Task Force 20, an American Special Operations team stationed in Iraq, expanded its operations dozens of miles inside Syria. Military...

INVENTED CITY.(St. Petersburg, Russia )
July 28, 2003... Growing up, the future Russian tsar who would be called Peter the Great studied geography on a globe taller than a man. The globe showed what was known about the earth's surface at the time--the late seventeenth century--with rivers and...

THE MIND'S EYE.(blindness)
July 28, 2003... In his last letter, Goethe wrote, "The Ancients said that the animals are taught through their organs; let me add to this, so are men, but they have the advantage of teaching their organs in return." He wrote this in 1832, a time when...

THE PAINTED DESERT.(Fitzroy Crossing in northwestern Australia)
July 28, 2003... Fitzroy Crossing, in northwestern Australia, is a group of settlements set between abrupt scarps of sandstone. The weather oscillates between the furnace heat of the dry season and the lashing rains of the wet, when saturated rocks glow red...

BROAD STRIPES, BRIGHT STARS.
July 28, 2003... Are you really interested in what men wear? Do you rifle hungrily through your Sunday paper to extract the semi-annual color supplement on men's style? Does an outfit in the window of Bergdorf's men's store ever stop you in your tracks like the...

THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLES.
July 28, 2003... A chapter from OTale of the Devil,O by Riccardo Orizio Few puzzles in political philosophy are more daunting than the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen. The Problem of the Loyal Henchmen is a subset of the more familiar Problem of Authority....

TIME TRIALS.('Henry V')(Theater Review)
July 28, 2003... "Henry V" (at the Delacorte Theatre, in Central Park, under the lively if uneven direction of Mark Wing-Davey) is Shakespeare's version of three-card monte: what you see is never what you get. What seems, on the surface, a panegyric to the...

KEEPING UP APPEARANCES.('Nip/Tuck')(Queer Eye for the Straight Guy)(Television Program Review)
July 28, 2003... For some years now, it has been hard to avoid shows that depict medical procedures in all their gory starkness. You're blithely turning channels, and all of a sudden you come across a complicated, scary birth, or a breast reduction, or an eye...

HIGH SEAS.('Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl')(The Housekeeper)(Movie Review)
July 28, 2003... What, I wonder, would the great swordsman Errol Flynn have made of Johnny Depp's fey, capering performance in "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl"? As Jack Sparrow, the deposed pirate captain of the Black Pearl, Depp does...