The New Yorker articles from March 2007

The New Yorker archives from March 2007

CLASSICAL NOTES.
March 5, 2007... VENETIAN GAMES -- Vivaldi's operas have not held the stage: he lacked Handel's gift for psychological insight and dramatic pacing. But Europe is full of front-rank early-music groups and stylish young singers, so the vibrant brand of...

TABLES FOR TWO.(Waverly Inn & Garden)(Restaurant review)
March 5, 2007... THE WAVERLY INN & GARDEN -- 16 Bank St. (212-243-7900)--This red brick town house was built in the eighteen-thirties. Before being reborn, last year, it was a low-key hangout beloved for its high-rolling Connect Four matches. For years, its...

PARTY TALK.
March 5, 2007... "Saturday Night Live" is erratic in middle age but rarely cruel. An exception came late last spring, when, at the stroke of eleven-thirty, an NBC announcer gravely told the American people to stand by for a "message from the President of the...

SHADES OF GRAY.(Spalding Gray)
March 5, 2007... Spalding Gray, a naked man who wore chinos and long-sleeved shirts, usually with the cuffs rolled up, last appeared onstage in New York in December, 2003. He once told an interviewer, "When people say to me, 'What do you do?' I say, 'I tell...

PECKED.
March 5, 2007... When Amy Cappellazzo, the international co-head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie's, secured a sale of selections from the Pierre Huber collection, one of the pieces about which she was most enthusiastic was "Flying Rats," by the...

KOBE BEEF.(Kobe Club)
March 5, 2007... Most mornings, Frank Bruni brews a pot of coffee and reads the online edition of the Times at his apartment, on the Upper West Side. Bruni, the paper's chief restaurant critic, had been warned that last Wednesday's Dining In section would...

THE NEW BATHROOM WALL.(bored-atlamont.com )(Website overview)
March 5, 2007... Most of the comments uttered at Harvard after the appointment of its new president, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, are probably lost to history. One exception is a conversation held recently at 12:35 A.M.: Hail to the new president, What's her name...

THE VIEW.(Travel narrative)
March 5, 2007... THE VIEW It was a hot day. My five-year-old daughter, Ruya, and I were out on the island of Buyukada, going for a ride in a horse-drawn carriage. I sat facing backward and my daughter sat facing me. She was looking at the road ahead. We...

MIAMI BLUE.
March 5, 2007... On a sunny morning last fall, John Timoney, the Miami chief of police, changed into navy-blue shorts and a short-sleeved shirt with "POLICE" stencilled on the back and wheeled his mountain bike out into the parking lot of the department's...

THE REDIRECTION.
March 5, 2007... A STRATEGIC SHIFT In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The "redirection," as...

ABOVE TOWN.(Eugene de Salignac)(Brief article)
March 5, 2007... No one in my family remembered much about my great-grandfather de Salignac. He was divorced from my great-grandmother soon after 1900, and lived the rest of his life alone, in New York City. My mother had a vague idea that he was a stockbroker;...

SPIDER WOMAN.
March 5, 2007... Early one morning last year, when the streets of downtown Los Angeles were still mostly deserted, a strange figure appeared in the Goodwill store at 235 South Broadway, next door to the Guadalupe Wedding Chapel. She had on tennis shoes,...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Knots)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 5, 2007... "The Solitude of Thomas Cave," by Georgina Harding "Family Romance," by John Lanchester "The Lost Life of Eva Braun," by Angela Lambert Knots, by Nuruddin Farah (Riverhead; $25.95). The second novel in a trilogy that began with...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Solitude of Thomas Cave)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 5, 2007... "Knots," by Nuruddin Farah "Family Romance," by John Lanchester "The Lost Life of Eva Braun," by Angela Lambert The Solitude of Thomas Cave, by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury; $23.95). This austere but atmospheric debut novel tells...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Family Romance)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 5, 2007... "Knots," by Nuruddin Farah "The Solitude of Thomas Cave," by Georgina Harding "The Lost Life of Eva Braun," by Angela Lambert Family Romance, by John Lanchester (Putnam; $27.95). Lanchester had always sensed "a kind of interior...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Lost Life of Eva Braun)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 5, 2007... "Knots," by Nuruddin Farah "The Solitude of Thomas Cave," by Georgina Harding "Family Romance," by John Lanchester The Lost Life of Eva Braun, by Angela Lambert (St. Martin's; $29.95). Dismissed by members of Hitler's inner circle...

FLASHES OF LIGHT.(Jeff Wall )
March 5, 2007... The Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of the resourceful Vancouver photographic artist Jeff Wall is richly uneven. It suggests less a career than a case history, tracking an intellectually ambitious, morally earnest perfectionist through the...

AGIT-OPERA.(Opera review)
March 5, 2007... Bertolt Brecht, the great politicizer of art, thought that opera was too laden with tradition to deliver shocks to the social order. As far as he was concerned, "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny," his 1930 collaboration with Kurt Weill,...

HOOFING IT.
March 5, 2007... Don't know your gaskin from your fetlock? Never mind, go to the Frick anyway for a show that in just seventeen paintings manages to convey the fabulous weirdness of the eighteenth-century English artist George Stubbs. Stubbs has been known...

TRAPPED IN TIME.(Theater review)
March 5, 2007... Can we agree that we're all haunted? The ghost world is part of our world. We carry within us the good and the bad, the spoken and the unspoken imperatives of our missing loved ones. As children, we are dreamed up by our parents; as adults,...

FREE SPIRITS.(Movie review)
March 5, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File "Amazing Grace," a vibrant historical epic about the ending of the slave trade in the British Empire, offers what might be called an ideal of virile ethical activity. William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd),...

TABLES FOR TWO.(Dressler)(Restaurant review)
March 12, 2007... DRESSLER -- 149 Broadway, between Bedford and Driggs Aves., Brooklyn (718-384-6343)--Colin Devlin, the owner of Williamsburg's beloved DuMont, named his latest venture after Steven Millhauser's 1996 novel, "Martin Dressler," about an...

DVD NOTES.(The Clock)(The Gang's All Here)(Video recording review)
March 12, 2007... The Current Cinema The Film File BATTLE OF THE SEXES -- Two of Hollywood's most deliriously stylized movies, Busby Berkeley's "The Gang's All Here," from 1943, and Vincente Minnelli's "The Clock," from 1945, are now available on DVD....

Remains of the Days.
March 12, 2007... Last week, our attention turned, collectively, to the problem of what ought to be done with the remains of one recognized even among nonbelievers as at least semi-divine--one who had, despite a complicated paternity, transformed our...

EXTREME THEATRE.("Voyage," "Shipwreck," "Salvage")
March 12, 2007... The Web site for the New York City Marathon lists the following tips: invest in good running shoes and lightweight clothing; consume plenty of fluids; pace yourself. When Henry Bergstein showed up at Lincoln Center on the morning of February...

REVOLVING DOOR.(restaurants)
March 12, 2007... New York, unlike the great capitals of Europe, has always been a city of reinvention. Manhattan schist excavated during the construction of the subway finds new life as an apartment building on Riverside Drive; meat lockers on Gansevoort Street...

BRITISH IMPORT.(Zoe Margolis)
March 12, 2007... In late 2003, Zoe Margolis read her first blog, Belle de Jour, which purports to be the diary of a London call girl. "She wrote about her working life of sex for money, and that wasn't my story," Margolis said the other day. "But I realized...

Reasonable Panic.(stock markets)
March 12, 2007... After last Tuesday's stock-market rout, which sent the Dow Jones average down more than four hundred points and erased more than half a trillion dollars of market value, Wall Street analysts and reporters quickly found a culprit: China. The...

THE DENIALISTS.(Zeblon Gwala, village healer, herbal medicine for AIDS)(Interview)
March 12, 2007... Zeblon Gwala is a husky forty-nine-year-old man with an unusually vivid dream life. For many years, he worked as a long-haul truck driver, crisscrossing South Africa from his base, in Durban. But he is in a different business now. A few years...

Swans' Way.('Swan Lake')
March 12, 2007... If you're trying to tell someone who Matthew Bourne is, all you have to say is "He's the English choreographer who made the 'Swan Lake' with the male swans," and the person says, "Oh, yes, the gay 'Swan Lake.' " In the traditional "Swan Lake,"...

THE UNTHINKABLE.
March 12, 2007... In October, 2005, a radiation sensor at the Port of Colombo, in Sri Lanka, signalled that the contents of an outbound shipping container included radioactive material. The port's surveillance system, installed with funds from the National...

SEASON ON THE CHALK.(cities and towns)
March 12, 2007... The massive chalk of Europe lies below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and--from Erith Reach to Gravesend--under fifteen miles of the...

CHAOS UNDER HEAVEN.(Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon )
March 12, 2007... "The man is unfit to be President," Henry Kissinger said of Richard Nixon during the 1968 Presidential campaign. Kissinger was a protege and associate of Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon's chief competition for the Republican nomination, and he shared...

En Garde!
March 12, 2007... On the night of June 10, 1804, Alexander Hamilton seated himself at his desk in his home in upper Manhattan to finish a letter explaining why the following morning would find him in Weehawken, New Jersey, pointing a flintlock pistol at...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Remainder)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 12, 2007... "Lost City Radio," by Daniel Alarcon "In Spite of the Gods," by Edward Luce "Toussaint Louverture," by Madison Smartt Bell Remainder, by Tom McCarthy (Vintage; $13.95). After being injured in an accident, the unnamed narrator of...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Lost City Radio)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 12, 2007... "Remainder," by Tom McCarthy "In Spite of the Gods," by Edward Luce "Toussaint Louverture," by Madison Smartt Bell Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcon (HarperCollins; $24.95). This debut novel tells the story of Norma, a broadcaster...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 12, 2007... "Remainder," by Tom McCarthy "Lost City Radio," by Daniel Alarcon "Toussaint Louverture," by Madison Smartt Bell In Spite of the Gods, by Edward Luce (Doubleday; $26). The C.I.A. has projected that India will become, within the...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Toussaint Louverture)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 12, 2007... "Remainder," by Tom McCarthy "Lost City Radio," by Daniel Alarcon "In Spite of the Gods," by Edward Luce Toussaint Louverture, by Madison Smartt Bell (Pantheon; $27). The legend of Toussaint Louverture is that of an illiterate...

Fear Factor.(Infinity on High by Fall Out Boy)(Sound recording review)
March 12, 2007... "Infinity on High," the new album by the Illinois rock band Fall Out Boy, debuted at No. 1 four weeks ago and has sold two hundred and sixty thousand copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The group's previous album, "From Under the Cork Tree"...

Down by the River.(The Host)(Movie review)
March 12, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File How come we get so many films about serial killers, teen-age libidos, and the Second World War, but nothing about giant mutant tadpoles? The imbalance has always struck me as unjust, and some of us have...

FALAI.(Iacopo Falai)(Falai Panetteria)
March 19, 2007... Before setting up on his own, Iacopo Falai was the pastry chef at Le Cirque 2000, and something of a pastry chef's fastidious showmanship informs his small restaurant on the Lower East Side, which takes a distinctly high-gloss approach to...

THE OLD BALLGAME.
March 19, 2007... The Current Cinema The Film File Though the silent films in "Reel Baseball" (Kino), a two-disk set of features and shorts made from 1899 to 1926, are of minor artistic value, they offer fascinating glimpses of the state of the...

Verdicts.
March 19, 2007... It took a jury ten days of deliberations to find I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Jr., the former chief of staff for Vice-President Dick Cheney, guilty of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators. On one...

Imaginary Friends.(Hunan Dynasty)
March 19, 2007... Hunan Dynasty, a few blocks from the Capitol, is not generally considered to be one of Washington's better Chinese restaurants, which is saying something, because, Chinese-food-wise, Washington is not New York, or, for that matter,...

Compound on Park.
March 19, 2007... It is probably safe to assume that Santiago Calatrava is the only architect in New York who lives in a town house on Park Avenue. It is an even surer bet that Calatrava is the only architect who has what amounts to a compound of three town...

Local Boy.
March 19, 2007... The life of twenty-seven-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda, the writer of and lead actor in the new musical "In the Heights"--about the ups and downs of the residents of a block in Washington Heights--seemed pretty serene the other day as he did some...

Satellite Sisters.
March 19, 2007... When the satellite-radio companies XM and Sirius announced, last month, that they were planning to merge, it looked like a futile attempt to flout antitrust regulations. The merger would benefit Sirius and XM--which, despite signing...

DRESSIN' TEXAN.
March 19, 2007... The first time I visited Texas, I wore a beige polyester-blend lab coat with reinforced slits for pocket access and mechanical-pencil storage. I was attending a local booksellers' convention, having just co-written a pseudoscientific book about...

REALITY ART SHOW.
March 19, 2007... Phil Collins, a video artist, was at a pay phone in the subway in Brooklyn when he found out that he'd been nominated for the Turner Prize, the world's best-known contemporary-art competition. "I was incredibly startled," Collins said. "The...

THIS OLD THING?(Decades)
March 19, 2007... Ten years ago, Cameron Silver, a former Weimar-style cabaret singer, opened a fancy vintage shop on Melrose Avenue, in Los Angeles. He was twenty-six, and he called the shop Decades. A few years later, Decades moved to a new space, above the...

IN THE NOW.
March 19, 2007... The headquarters of Chanel are situated in two adjacent eighteenth-century buildings on the Rue Cambon, in Paris, occupying a labyrinthine suite of rooms on five floors, above a street-level Chanel boutique. One evening last December, Karl...

BAG MAN.
March 19, 2007... "What we do has been well honed over the years. People can get incendiary and you try to keep a lid on that. You do it in the first ten minutes you walk in the door. Take my lead. If there are decisions to be made, I'll make them. When the door...

WHERE THERE'S A WILL.(Leni Riefenstahl )
March 19, 2007... On February 17, 1936, Time ran a cover story about the Fourth Winter Olympics, which Adolf Hitler had inaugurated earlier that month in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a German ski resort near the Austrian border. The summer games, Olympiad XI, were to...

Heyday.(Tales from the Town of Widows)(The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War)(The High Road to China)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 19, 2007... "Tales from the Town of Widows," by James Canon "The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War," by Leonard L. Richards "The High Road to China," by Kate Teltscher Andersen's second novel follows a mid-nineteenth-century...

Tales from the Town of Widows.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 19, 2007... "Heyday," by Kurt Andersen "The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War," by Leonard L. Richards "The High Road to China," by Kate Teltscher In this debut novel, guerrillas forcibly recruit all the men in a Colombian...

The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 19, 2007... "Heyday," by Kurt Andersen "Tales from the Town of Widows," by James Canon "The High Road to China," by Kate Teltscher When a golden pebble was discovered at Johann Sutter's sawmill in 1848, setting off the Gold Rush, many in the...

The High Road to China.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 19, 2007... "Heyday," by Kurt Andersen "Tales from the Town of Widows," by James Canon "The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War," by Leonard L. Richards In 1774, George Bogle, a young envoy for the East India Company,...

KINGS AND KINGMAKERS.(Theater review)
March 19, 2007... Kevin Kline is a recessive star, in the Fredric March mode, but not recessive to the point of becoming knotted up in his own acting, thank God. Like Robert Downey, Jr., he has an intelligence and a love of the game that often surpass the leaden...

Abstraction Problem.(Comic Abstraction)
March 19, 2007... Remember abstract painting? It used to be the living end of modernity in art. Now it's just one variety of produce in the supermarket of visual culture. Two shows stir thoughts on the subject: new work by the paladin of white paintings, Robert...

Salvage Artists.(Single Speed Design)(Big Dig House)
March 19, 2007... One day in the winter of 2003, John Hong opened an e-mail to Single Speed Design, the architecture firm he runs with his wife, Jinhee Park, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was from a structural engineer named Paul Pedini, who said that he had...

TAKING SIDES.(Movie review)
March 19, 2007... Movie Listings The Film File As any aisle-hugging aesthete will tell you, the look, feel, and form of a film are just as important as its "themes." Indeed, the thematic material of a movie can no more easily be separated from the...

Hip Replacement.(LCD Soundsystem)
March 26, 2007... About five years ago, indie rockers began to rediscover the pleasures of rhythm. Punk funk, as it was called in the seventies and early eighties, made a return, and New York bands like the Rapture and their production team, the DFA, started...

Amorina.(Restaurant review)
March 26, 2007... Amorina is a study in contradictions. The bright lights, set in mismatched fixtures, the neon sign in the window, and the takeout service seem to indicate a neighborhood pizza joint, but the relatively high prices--twelve dollars for most of...

BULLETS.
March 26, 2007... Ordinarily, few jobs in the legal world are as exalted and exhilarating as being a United States Attorney. But last week Tim Griffin, the recently installed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, was not enjoying his new...

TRUE NORTH.
March 26, 2007... The American explorer Robert Peary reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909. With him were four Eskimos-- Oatah, Egingwah, Seegloo, and Ookeah--and Matthew Henson, an African-American guide. To Barbara Hillary, Henson is both a hero and a goad....

COMEBACK.
March 26, 2007... The annual luncheon of the New York Council of Defense Lawyers is usually an amiable schmoozefest over chicken cutlets. But at the event the other day, at the Grand Hyatt, the introduction of this year's guest speaker reduced the group of...

THE GROOM REAPER.
March 26, 2007... The founding principle of the Universal Life Church, which was begun in 1959 in Modesto, California, by a renegade Baptist minister, is that the legal and social privileges traditionally enjoyed by men of the cloth--the right to perform...

Rembrandt's Ghost.
March 26, 2007... In April, 1973, the month that Picasso died, he was asked to choose an image to be used as a poster for a show of recent work at the Palace of the Popes, in Avignon. He picked "The Young Painter," an oil sketch he'd done a year earlier, at the...

Anything Pink Rocks.
March 26, 2007... Not long ago, a woman from Brooklyn named Shavonne wanted a catsuit to wear to a costume party. She went to Trash and Vaudeville, a clothing store in the East Village, and spoke to Jimmy Webb, a salesman. "I don't have catsuits," Webb told her....

Betrayed.
March 26, 2007... On a cold, wet night in January, I met two young Iraqi men in the lobby of the Palestine Hotel, in central Baghdad. A few Arabic television studios had rooms on the upper floors of the building, but the hotel was otherwise vacant. In the lobby,...

Vagabonds.(Biography)
March 26, 2007... "And then I never saw him again": this phrase recurs with eerie frequency in the work of the Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolano, who died four years ago, in Barcelona, at the age of fifty. In Bolano's ten novels and three story collections--all...

Air Rage.
March 26, 2007... When it comes to artists, ambition is a tricky business. Whereas stockbrokers and politicians may labor with certain realistic goals in mind--greater riches, a Cabinet seat--artists' rewards are more elusive. The artist, possessed by the desire...

Finn.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 26, 2007... This harrowing debut novel imagines the life of Huckleberry Finn's father, known simply as Finn, an irredeemable savage perpetually drunk on forty-rod whiskey. The son of a vitriolically racist Illinois judge, Finn subsists by running trotlines...

Then We Came to the End.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 26, 2007... Setting his novel in a Chicago advertising agency that has been forced to lay off workers, Ferris brilliantly captures the fishbowl quality of contemporary office life, where nothing much happens and the smallest events take on huge...

The Father of All Things.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 26, 2007... In 2003, Bissell travelled to Vietnam with his father, who had fought there nearly four decades before. Their relationship was uneasy: as a child, Bissell once reported his father to an abuse hotline (after an unusually physical game of rock,...

One Day a Year, 1960-2000.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 26, 2007... Few writing careers have been as public as that of Wolf, East Germany's most famous writer; she was both a loyal supporter of her country and a fervent critic (watched by the Stasi and also, for a brief period early in her career, informing for...

Travelling On.(The Riches)(Television program review)
March 26, 2007... As a performer, the British comedian and actor Eddie Izzard is a warm-blooded snake: slithery, relaxed, and projecting good will. He'll wind himself around you, but he doesn't bite; he appears to like both himself and his audiences, though he...

Loves Lost.(Reign Over Me)(Movie review)
March 26, 2007... Of all the things to make you pause, hand on wallet, before shelling out for a movie ticket, try this: a film about the aftermath of 9/11, starring Adam Sandler. What possible cultural need, one might ask, could be met by such a project? It is...