The New Yorker articles from March 2003

The New Yorker archives from March 2003

South for the Winter.(books on French Riviera)(Brief Article)(Bibliography)
March 3, 2003... "Earthly paradise discovered. Come," the artist Francis Picabia telegraphed his wife in 1909; Picabia was vacationing in Cassis, on the Cote d'Azur, and thought he should share the place's benefits. In FRENCH RIVIERA (Assouline), Xavier Girard...

CLASS OF 1942.(World War II veteran reflects on war memories and on possible war with Iraq)
March 3, 2003... Neil MacKenna, my brother-in-law, got blown up in the fighting at Belfort Gap, in eastern France, and walked with a limp after that. Now he walks with two canes. John Brackett, Walter Ebbitt, and William (Boopa) Sturtevant, Jr., who were school...

ORANGE AND WHITE.(Whitney Museum of American Art exhibits machine that displays excerpts from Internet chat rooms)
March 3, 2003... Weird week. Weird, weird week, passing from alert orange to heavenly white and back to the usual muddle of slush. People keep trying to "gauge public opinion" at this moment of crisis. Fortunately, though, in the past year in New York we've had...

THE BIG TIME MADE EASY.(Jean Doumanian's seminar on getting a play or movie produced)
March 3, 2003... One recent evening at the Omni Berkshire Place Hotel, in midtown, sixty would-be producers and writers crowded into a conference room to attend a two-hour seminar given by the producer Jean Doumanian. The event, entitled "Learn How to Get Your...

WAITING FOR MATSUI.(baseball player Hideki Matsui )
March 3, 2003... Yoshihiro Ando had performed the ritual of observing Hideki Matsui emerge from a sport-utility vehicle and duck into Yankee Stadium. Having been assured that Matsui would lift weights and hit baseballs for no less than four hours, he had...

INDIAN POINT BLANK.(security at Indian Point nuclear power plant)
March 3, 2003... In a Q. & A., Elizabeth Kolbert discusses Indian Point and the threat it may pose "Emergency Planning for Indian Point: A Guide for You and Your Family" is a booklet published as a public service by the plant's owner, Entergy Nuclear...

OUT OF CHARACTER.(actress Frances McDormand)(Interview)
March 3, 2003... The kidnap victim is lying dead on the kitchen floor. The murderer is out back, feeding his accomplice's body into a wood-chipper. Slowly, crunching through the snow, the police officer comes around the house. She is a woman, and she is hugely...

THE OPTIMIST.(Kofi Annan)(Interview)
March 3, 2003... From a distance, Kofi Annan's gray hair and goatee cast a hazy nimbus around his face, and his features appear as if in soft focus. At closer range, it is an easy face to look at, in no way extraordinary, and this is its advantage: it does not...

TWIN PEAKS.(Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Musuem of Modern Art, New York, NY)
March 3, 2003... "Matisse Picasso," which has come to the Museum of Modern Art's temporary home, in Queens, after triumphant appearances in Paris and London, is a marvellous exhibition with a frail hook. With sixty-seven mostly top-drawer paintings, drawings,...

BORROWED CULTURE.(V. S. Naipaul )
March 3, 2003... From 1998, Paul Theroux on his friendship with V. S. Naipaul From 1999, letters between V. S. Naipaul and his family New York City. The nineteen-nineties. One fall afternoon, a black writer renowned for his examination of colonialism...

LOVE CRAZY.("A Ship Made of Paper")(Book Review)
March 3, 2003... Idealism, hubris, and hypomania in about equal measure characterize the thirty-six-year-old protagonist of Scott Spencer's new novel, "A Ship Made of Paper" (Ecco; $24.95), who embarks upon a reckless love affair with a young wife and mother:...

MAVERICKS.(composer Lou Harrison; 'The Trojans')(Obituary)
March 3, 2003... The composer Lou Harrison, who died on February 2nd, at the age of eighty-five, described himself not long ago as "an old man who's had a lot of fun." He was a great deal more than that, though what posterity will make of him is difficult to...

COMPROMISES.("The Life of David Gale"; "Daredevil")(Movie Review)
March 3, 2003... "The Life of David Gale" is one of those hyper-articulate messes which inspire awe and a kind of nauseated pity. This is no ordinary cock-up: this is a remarkably talented cock-up, made with wit and feeling and featuring a classic performance...

Mycological Positivism.('Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard' and 'Peter Jordan's Wild Mushroom Bible')(Book Review)
March 10, 2003... Nicholas P. Money is wild about mushrooms. "I count myself among the few humans who love fungi, truly, madly, deeply,"he writes in MR. BLOOMFIELD'S ORCHARD (Oxford), a companionable foray into the realm of stinkhorns, black mold, yeast, and...

WAGING PEACE.(effects of US efforts to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq)
March 10, 2003... President Bush has now taken to suggesting that a war to get rid of Saddam Hussein be thought of as analogous to the Second World War. Last week, the President spoke in utopian terms of the aftermath of such a war, for which he is openly...

MUST-SEE SADDAM.(journalist Dan Rather criticized for not pushing Saddam Hussein during interview that flattered Hussein)
March 10, 2003... Saddam Hussein looks good in a suit, doesn't he? What was that green notebook on the table for? He holds a pen in his right hand--guess that means he's right-handed. The pen: isn't that a Uni-Ball Vision, the one where you can see how much ink...

PUMP CLOSED.(closure of many Gaseteria gasoline stations in New York, New York)
March 10, 2003... As demolition begins this spring on the Gaseteria filling station at the corner of Lafayette and Houston streets, the presence of a conspicuous New York brand will be diminished. This scruffy property, along with twenty-four other Gaseterias in...

STORE TO STORE.(Yottoy Productions sells toys door-to-door to businesses)
March 10, 2003... Kate Karcher Clark, president and founder of the seven-year-old Yottoy Productions, and Peter Doodeheefver, vice-president and creative director of same, set out one recent morning to sell their wares to toy stores, lugging a twenty-pound...

THE WAGES OF WAR.(effects of war on the US economy)
March 10, 2003... On April 18, 1942, sixteen American bombers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle took off from the aircraft carrier Hornet and flew six hundred miles to bomb Tokyo. The bombers did little damage, and all but one of them were...

THE UNLOVED AMERICAN.(evolution of the stereotype of Americans)
March 10, 2003... On the Fourth of July in 1889, Rudyard Kipling found himself near Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone with a party of tourists from New England. He winced as a "clergyman rose up and told them they were the greatest, freest, sublimest, most...

TEEN SPIRIT.(teenagers in Russia)
March 10, 2003... In the late nineteen-eighties, I was sent to Stuyvesant High School, in Manhattan, a magnet school specializing in math and the sciences that was also a kind of holding pen for multinational nerds. The majority of us were immigrants or the...

LOST IN THE JIHAD.(case of John Walker Lindh, convicted of fighting for the Afghan Army)
March 10, 2003... Five weeks ago, John Walker Lindh, better known as the American Taliban, was quietly transferred to a medium-security prison northeast of Los Angeles, in the Mojave Desert. He was relieved by the move, which took place after federal officials...

EYES ON THE PRIZE.(selection of new building design for World Trade Center Site, New York, New York)
March 10, 2003... From September, 2001, Paul Goldberger on the immediate aftermath of 9/11 From May, 2002, Goldberger on framing the debate over a memorial From January, 2003, Goldberger on the welter of proposals for the site From September, 2002,...

CONNECTING THE DOTS.('The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the F.B.I. and C.I.A. Failed to Stop It')(Book Review)
March 10, 2003... Malcolm Gladwell discusses the epistemology of surprise In the fall of 1973, the Syrian Army began to gather a large number of tanks, artillery batteries, and infantry along its border with Israel. Simultaneously, to the south, the Egyptian...

PARLOR MUSIC.(artist Edouard Vuillard, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.)
March 10, 2003... Edouard Vuillard, who is the subject of a huge retrospective of paintings, drawings, prints, decorative projects, and photographs at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., was one of the great fin-de-siecle neurotics who established...

REALITY THEATRE.('Brace Up!, St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn, New York, New York)(Theater Review)
March 10, 2003... Could be Melikhovo, could be anywhere. The three sisters--Olga, Masha, and Irina--live with their brother, Andrei, in the provincial town where their father, a military man, was stationed, or retired, before he died, far from the family's...

CULTURE SHOCKS.('Laurel Canyon,' 'Irreversible')(Movie Review)
March 10, 2003... Among its other accomplishments, "Laurel Canyon"is to be congratulated for addressing the ever-topical question of whether, why, and, above all, where you should have sex with your mother-in-law-to-be. The answers, in case you're interested,...

Away from It All.(Book Review)
March 17, 2003... Ancient and isolated, the twenty Orthodox monasteries on the Greek peninsula of MOUNT ATHOS do not make the headlines often, but the current standoff between the conservative monks of Esphigmenou (motto: "Orthodoxy or Death”) and other...

ATTACK ANXIETY.
March 17, 2003... Writing on the op-ed page of the Times the other day, Christopher Buckley reminisced about a previous era when Europeans turned out by the million to demonstrate in the streets against what they took to be American bellicosity. Twenty years...

EATING LIKE A NOMINEE.(movie awards)
March 17, 2003... It is fashionable to lament the increasing number of awards ceremonies in the entertainment business, but the lament is mean and unjust. Records show that, in the past two months alone, there have been entire weekday evenings on which Julianne...

THE FACE PAINTER.
March 17, 2003... Pat McGrath, a British makeup artist--the most powerful black woman in fashion who is not a model (and not an Irish man, as some of her early clients supposed)--flew to Paris in mid-January with three assistants and fifteen seventy-pound...

THE BOILER MAN.
March 17, 2003... One thing that distinguishes Henry Gifford's New York City Boiler Tour is the fact that there are no boiler tours quite like it in New York City, not to mention anywhere else in the United States or, possibly, the world. Another is the singular...

LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN.(Adnan Khashoggi)
March 17, 2003... At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and...

DRESSING FOR LULA.(Brazilian politician Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva)
March 17, 2003... It was hard, in the weeks before the landslide victory last October of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the left-wing candidate in Brazil's recent Presidential election, to find anyone who was very enthusiastic about his opponent, Jose Serra. Serra...

A SAMURAI IN PARIS.(fashion editor Suzy Menkes)
March 17, 2003... It was just before noon on a chilly January day in Paris when Suzy Menkes, the International Herald Tribune's influential fashion editor, bustled into the newspaper's headquarters, in the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. The evening before, Menkes...

THE WOLF AT THE DOOR.(bulimia)
March 17, 2003... The Italian performance artist Vanessa Beecroft lives with her American husband, Greg Durkin, and their seventeen-month-old son, Dean, in an isolated house off a dirt road on Long Island's north shore. Durkin, who has worked in the movie...

THE ART OF FANTASY.(Concert Review)
March 17, 2003... Schubert's Sonata in G begins with a beautiful, sleepy, not immediately gripping theme--not so much a melody as a murmur of chords. It keeps ambling out in various directions only to retreat to the same delectable place, as if it could not...

OUT OF SIGHT.("Aldous Huxley")(Book Review)
March 17, 2003... When we were young, clueless, and longing to be profound, what a thrill it was to open a novel weirdly entitled "Eyeless in Gaza."The thrill was doubled when the author turned out to be quoting "Samson Agonistes”: "Eyeless in Gaza, at the...

LOVE IS THE DRUG.("Vincent in Brixton")(Theater Review)
March 17, 2003... He was born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, a village in the southern Netherlands, near the Belgian border, to a father, Theodorus van Gogh, who was himself an anomaly--a Protestant clergyman in a predominantly Catholic region. With his...

BOY TALK.("Real Time with Bill Maher")(Television Program Review)
March 17, 2003... Last year, much was made of ABC's secret, and then absurdly publicized, courting of David Letterman for its 11:30 p.m. time slot, a move that would have meant the demise of "Nightline"and of Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect,"which followed...

RIDING INTO BATTLE.(Movie Review)
March 17, 2003... "Tears of the Sun,"the new military adventure movie starring Bruce Willis, is a troubled dream of Africa. The physical terrain (with Hawaii standing in for Nigeria) is a stunningly beautiful fantasia of dark high grass surrounded by thick rain...

Black and White and Red All Over.(new books)(Book Review)
March 24, 2003... In a scene straight out of a screwball comedy, Norma Barzman shoved a pie in her future husband's face on the day they met. In The Red and the Blacklist (Thunder's Mouth), Barzman recounts other zany moments among Communist-sympathizer...

TERROR AND TORTURE.(use of torture when dealing with terrorist suspects)
March 24, 2003... "I see that a man I know to be a ruffian is pursuing a young girl,"Leo Tolstoy wrote in "The Kingdom of God Is Within You.""I have a gun in my hand--I kill the ruffian and save the girl. But the death or the wounding of the ruffian has...

THINK POSITIVE.(New York Rangers hockey player Bobby Holik)
March 24, 2003... Bobby Holik, the New York Rangers' nine-million-dollar center, is not one of the most popular players in the National Hockey League. A few years ago, when he was playing for the New Jersey Devils, some Ranger players wrote his uniform...

DECISIONS, DECISIONS.(investment management)
March 24, 2003... For months, traders on the world's stock and commodity exchanges have been preoccupied with one issue: war with Iraq. If you think that war will be over quickly, you buy stocks. If you believe that it will drag on, you sell them. And if you...

INVASIONS.
March 24, 2003... From 1952, a look at Iraq as it was half a century ago A turab, an ill wind that makes the air clammy-hot and full of dust, swept through Baghdad on the sixth of March, signalling the beginning of spring, with summer soon to follow. The sky...

NOTHING FANCY.(actor Clint Eastwood)
March 24, 2003... Clint Eastwood recently began directing a new feature film, "Mystic River,"but, just days before starting, he embarked on making "Piano Blues,"one of seven parts of a documentary about the blues which Martin Scorsese is producing for public...

THE PRINCE.(Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States)
March 24, 2003... During the first weeks of the second Bush Administration, the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, met with the new President. Bandar, who is fifty-three and has been the Saudi Ambassador for twenty years,...

GHOST SONATA.(Theodor Adorno and other German composers; state of German music)
March 24, 2003... Dr. Mengele, we are told, sometimes relaxed to the strains of "Tristan und Isolde"after performing his experiments. The Berlin Staatskapelle played Siegfried's Funeral Music at the state funeral of S.S. Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich,...

THE HISTORICAL ROMANCE.(writing of 'To The Finland Station' by Edmund Wilson)
March 24, 2003... The idea for "To the Finland Station"came to Edmund Wilson while he was walking down a street in the East Fifties one day, in the depths of the Great Depression. Wilson was in his late thirties. He had established himself as a critic and...

STONE OF THE HEART.('The Stone Virgins')(Book Review)
March 24, 2003... In 1929, Virginia Woolf delivered a passionate polemic about the odds facing a woman born with a great gift for writing. She suggested that in the preceding centuries such a person would have become crazed, shot herself, or been stigmatized as...

EUROPEANISM.(Douglas Gordon, Franz West; video installation art; Gagosian Gallery)
March 24, 2003... A video installation at the Gagosian Gallery features a performance by an Indian elephant. The video, which is the work of the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, who shot it last year in the gallery, is entitled "Play Dead; Real Time."The...

ONLY THE LONELY.(films by Nicholas Ray)
March 24, 2003... I blame the French. In the nineteen-fifties, the young guns of Cahiers du Cinema turned their sights upon American film. Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette, among others, declared their immortal love for certain American...

AFTER THE BATTLE.(Pres Bush's foreign policy)
March 31, 2003... On June 12, 1945, a month after V-E Day, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, received an ancient honor, the "freedom"of the City of London. In his address that day, at Guildhall, General Eisenhower said:...

TV GOES TO WAR.(television coverage of the Iraq War)
March 31, 2003... "Shock and awe”: it was no euphemism. Not since September 11, 2001, has the world seen images of such tremendous devastation occurring in such an unbelievably short amount of time. Beginning at around 9 p.m. in Baghdad on Friday, as many...

A BAGHDAD BLOGGER.(Internet diary of resident of Baghdad, Iraq)
March 31, 2003... During the past five months, a Manhattan office worker named Diane has exchanged nearly a hundred e-mails with Salam, a young architect in Baghdad. She is an unmarried Jew who lives on the Upper West Side; he is a closeted gay Iraqi from a...

THE PRIME MINISTER.(UK prime minister Tony Blair)
March 31, 2003... In London, the cultural draw of the season has been the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery. The curators have gathered paintings that have not hung together for more than four hundred years, and the galleries are staying open four...

THE PROTESTERS.
March 31, 2003... Marchers converged on Times Square from every direction on Thursday afternoon. From the Farley Post Office, on Eighth Avenue, came New Yorkers Say No to War, Peace Initiative Turkey, and Code Pink: Women for Peace. The War Resisters League...

HOW IT CAME TO WAR.(Iraq War)
March 31, 2003... Jon Lee Anderson reports from Baghdad Seymour M. Hersh on who forged evidence against Iraq From 1991, the motives of the first Gulf War, and why it didn't settle the question of Saddam Washington had a vertiginous feeling last week...

WHO LIED TO WHOM?
March 31, 2003... Jon Lee Anderson reports from Baghdad Nicholas Lemann on when Bush decided to fight From 1991, the motives of the first Gulf War, and why it didn't settle the question of Saddam Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on...

THE TEE ROOM.(history of golf balls discussed in the site of the Russian Tea Room, New York, New York)
March 31, 2003... In the first week of 2003, I had lunch at the Russian Tea Room, which had gone bankrupt and closed its doors forever in the middle of 2002. Among the still hovering samovars, I ate takein pizza with tomatoes and fresh garlic. Rand Jerris, in...

THE DEVIL'S ACCOUNTANT.(Noam Chomsky criticizes foreign policy)
March 31, 2003... On Thursday evenings at M.I.T., Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century and one of the most reviled, teaches a class about politics. There are nearly two hundred students and not enough chairs, so latecomers sit or lie...

THE BOMBING OF BAGHDAD.
March 31, 2003... Nicholas Lemann on when Bush decided to fight Seymour M. Hersh on who forged evidence against Iraq From 1991, the motives of the first Gulf War, and why it didn't settle the question of Saddam The morning the first cruise missiles...

TO HELL AND BACK.(festival in honor of Hector Berlioz at the Lincoln Center)
March 31, 2003... "Berlioz believed neither in God nor in Bach, neither in absolute beauty in art nor in pure virtue in life,"his friend Ferdinand Hiller recalled. The composer of the "Symphonie Fantastique"retains a fashionably satanic aura, and the reputation...

LOUDMOUTH.('Khrushchev: The Man and His Era')(Book Review)
March 31, 2003... Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was the unquestioned leader of the Soviet Union from 1957 to 1964. In this fairly short span, he managed to provoke two major international crises; survive a coup (a second toppled him); order two disastrous...

ONE-WAY STREET.('Cosmopolis')(Book Review)
March 31, 2003... In a land of chunky, garish, anxiousto-please books, Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel, "Cosmopolis"(Scribner; $25), is physically cool, as sleek and silver-touched and palely pure as a white stretch limo, which is in fact the action's main venue....

BIG LOSER, SMALL WINNER.('Dreamcatcher' and 'Raising Victor Vargas')(Movie Review)
March 31, 2003... In "Dreamcatcher,"the new big-budget horror film from Warner Bros., based on a novel by Stephen King and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, an abominable worm shows up, the kind of horror-film beast with more teeth than William F. Buckley and an...

CRIMINAL JUSTICE.('Without a Trace' and 'The Shield')(Television Program Review)
March 31, 2003... "Without a Trace,"CBS's Thursday-night drama about the New York City Missing Persons Squad of the F.B.I., is one of the handful of shows to have emerged during Jerry Bruckheimer's short but impressively productive television career; better...