The New Yorker articles from October 2003

The New Yorker archives from October 2003

Now Paging.(two books on reading and publishing)(Book Review)
October 6, 2003... So Many Books, So Little Time: a year of passionate reading (Putnam), by Sara Nelson, takes as its title the exasperated cry of literary professionals everywhere, a cry that is echoed by the nearly simultaneous publication of the almost...

SOLO ACT.(George W. Bush at the United Nations)
October 6, 2003... Last week, President Bush came to New York to make his case--if one can call it that--for international cooperation. At the opening of the annual meeting of the United Nations' General Assembly, Bush spoke of the need for countries to combat...

PACE YOURSELF.(Democratic candidates for president take part in debate hosted by Pace University)
October 6, 2003... For those not lucky enough to have tickets to last Thursday's Democratic debate at Pace University, downtown, the place to be was not the so-called spin room--a gigantic basement gymnasium hastily equipped to accommodate four hundred media reps...

LAWYER WALKS INTO A BAR.(New Jersey Law Journal celebrates anniversary)
October 6, 2003... The New Jersey Law Journal, one of America's oldest legal newspapers, published its first issue in 1878, with the following boast: "But if our State is a small part of the nation, she has a judiciary known and honored abroad, and at her Bar are...

GEORGE PLIMPTON.(Obituary)
October 6, 2003... A few weeks before entering the ring at Stillman's Gym against Archie (the Mongoose) Moore, George Plimpton ordered a "wildcat" drink called Crashweight Formula #7. Plimpton would need whatever bulking up he could get in order to survive the...

THE COUP DE GRASSO.(public outrage leads New York Stock Exchange Chaiman Richard Grasso to resign)
October 6, 2003... At the end of your typical Horatio Alger novel, the plucky hero, having risen from the streets, is allowed to bask in his good fortune. He's celebrated, not vilified, for the prosperity he has gained. So Dick Grasso, the former chairman of the...

THE VERY BAD REVIEW.(the 1886 review by John Churton Collins of a book on literary history by Edmund Gosse; the fate of the reviewer and the reviewed)(Critical Essay)(Biography)
October 6, 2003... If you were John Keats, and, in the revered Quarterly Review, John Wilson Croker published his opinion that your poetry was "unintelligible," "diffuse," "tiresome," and "absurd," it would not comfort you much to remember that a bad review can...

CHICKEN-SOUP NATION.(Jack Canfield, Mark Victor and their series of self help books)(Interview)(Biography)
October 6, 2003... In the fall of 1991, one of the book proposals being shopped around New York was a big sheaf of materials from a young literary agent named Jeffrey Herman, who was specializing in popular business books. Herman had already represented some...

THE LISTENER.(J. Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of Representatives)(Interview)(Biography)
October 6, 2003... In July, at the Petunia Festival Parade in Dixon, Illinois, on a street near Ronald Reagan's boyhood home, which is now a lovingly groomed national historic site, a parade-goer named John S. Allen threw a water balloon at an antique fire engine...

DARKNESS VISIBLE.(book of photographs of nuclear weapons testing)(Book Review)
October 6, 2003... The atomic bomb set off in the Nevada desert on June 4, 1953, a little over sixty miles from Las Vegas, was code-named Climax. It was dropped from an airplane and detonated 1,334 feet above the desert floor. Rockets fired from the ground just...

FINDING AUGIE MARCH.(the work of novelist Saul Bellow)(Critical Essay)
October 6, 2003... We tend to think of young artists as a wild and crazy bunch, but often they are the opposite--depressed, grouchy people who sit around wondering why all those older artists are getting the grants and the contracts. Their work bespeaks their...

American Writers.(Book Review)
October 6, 2003... Alfred Kazin's America, edited by Ted Solotaroff (HarperCollins; $29.95). The literary critic Alfred Kazin chose America as his subject, and his intellectual awakening is itself something of an American legend. As a young man during the...

THE END MATTER.(completion of bibliographical information for the college term paper, use of Microsoft Word, instructions of The College Manual of Style)
October 6, 2003... It is 2:30 a.m. of a Monday, spring semester, 1983. Things are looking extremely good. Forty-eight hours of high-intensity stack work and some inspired typing have produced the thirty-page final paper for Modern European History (Mr. Blague, MW...

SMART MONEY.(economic theories for analysing the stock market)
October 6, 2003... Stock markets can be puzzling things. Earlier this year, Wall Street analysts were complaining that uncertainty about Iraq was preventing a sustained rally. On Wednesday, April 9th, when the Marines entered downtown Baghdad and toppled a statue...

FEATS OF CLAY.(exhibition of the ceramic art of Ken Price)
October 6, 2003... Ken Price, a veteran West Coast artist who is not nearly as well known in New York as he should be, is a ceramist and sculptor. His current show, at Matthew Marks, may be the most purely pleasurable in town, and one that affords a chance to...

CULTURAL GAS.(Omnium Gatherum)(The Harlequin Studies)(Theater Review)
October 6, 2003... "Rhubarb," it says in my dictionary of slang, is Second World War vernacular for a "low-level strafing mission." So it's no coincidence that the curtain rises on Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros's witty, pugnacious play "Omnium...

UNHAPPY TRAILS.(The Station Agent)(Wonderland)(Movie Review)
October 6, 2003... You can tell what a fine movie "The Station Agent" is from some of the noble institutions that are thanked in the final credits: Barry's Luncheonette, Good-to-Go Deli, and the inspiring Lunacy Beer. This was clearly a well-fed operation, and...

Under the Big Top.(Book Review)
October 13, 2003... The circus has long been a refuge for society's misfits; for some, it is the inherent danger of the acts that offers a welcome escape from reality. Faith--the heroine of the first novel by the late Amanda Davis, Wonder When You'll Miss Me...

FRENCH KISSING.(Fremch Pres. Jacques Chirac kisses Laura Bush's hand)
October 13, 2003... The other morning dawned for the bleary-eyed average New York newspaper reader with a somewhat startling pair of stop-motion photographs. The front page of the Post showed Laura Bush having her hand bussed by Jacques Chirac, the President of...

THE "D" WORD.(Michael Dukakis)
October 13, 2003... Howard Dean, the putative Democratic front-runner, may be gathering strength around the country, but in Washington, D.C., political professionals have tended to see him as a sure loser, a reincarnation of the Democrats' disastrous 1988 nominee,...

AGELESS, GUILTLESS.(psychotherapist Albert Ellis)
October 13, 2003... The second-most-influential psychotherapist of the twentieth century, by the reckoning of the American Psychological Association, turned ninety last month. His name is Albert Ellis, and, in case you didn't know, he is the founder of...

AND IN THIS CORNER.(boxing match between Bernard McGuirk and Sid Rosenberg)
October 13, 2003... In the annals of great New York prizefights, last week's bout between Bernard (Berzerk) McGuirk and Sid (the Hebrew Hammer) Rosenberg will likely rank a cut or two below Dempsey-Firpo and Ali-Frazier I, but let's give credit where it's due: for...

A MAALOX MOMENT.(sword swallowing)
October 13, 2003... No one asked if there was a doctor in the house, but during a recent performance of the show "Carnival Knowledge," whose star, Todd Robbins, swallows swords and eats glass, a doctor by the name of Jonathan Cohen was in the audience. The doctor...

JUMPERS.(Golden Gate Bridge as suicide magnet)
October 13, 2003... Shortly after ten-thirty in the morning on Wednesday, March 19th, a real-estate agent named Paul Alarab began hiking across the Golden Gate Bridge. Midway along the walkway, which carries pedestrians and cyclists between San Francisco and Marin...

THE STUDENT.(Hillary Clinton)
October 13, 2003... On January 26, 1993, six days after becoming First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton paid a private visit to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The encounter took place at Onassis's Fifth Avenue apartment, where lunch was served in the living room,...

POST-IMPERIAL BLUES.(post-Soviet Russia)
October 13, 2003... On a murky day twenty years ago, I sat in a Soviet railcar (Helsinki-Leningrad; rain-drizzled windows) reading a collection of stories by Vladimir Nabokov. There was then, as there no longer is, an illicit thrill in crossing over, West to East:...

EXPOSURE TIME.(photographer Diane Arbus)(Biography)
October 13, 2003... The woman who will stop at nothing was a Fury, a bacchante, and a saint courting martyrdom long before she was a self-immolating modern artist. But she became a heroine in and of the nineteen-sixties, and by going too far she raised the bar of...

DOWN TO EARTH.(Joan of Arcadia )(Coupling)(Television Program Review)
October 13, 2003... It sounds like a sure miss--a show about a teen-ager who talks to God, a God who takes the form, variously, of a teen-age boy in jeans and a corduroy jacket, a school-cafeteria worker, an electrician, and a little girl playing ball. But "Joan...

DEAD RECKONING.(Mystic River)(Kill Bill - Vol. 1)(Movie Review)
October 13, 2003... Clint Eastwood has directed good movies in the past ("Unforgiven," "A Perfect World"), but he has never directed anything that haunts one's dreams the way "Mystic River" does. This extraordinary film, an outburst of tragic realism and grief,...

In the Spotlight.(ELEONORA DUSE: A BIOGRAPHY )(Book Review)
October 20, 2003... Eleonora Duse, the turn-of-the-century Italian actress who inspired Stanislavsky's Method, told her company that to play Ibsen's characters they had to know unhappiness, and, if necessary, they should go looking for it. In ELEONORA DUSE: A...

MOVIE STRUCK.(movie fan narrative)(The Talk of the Town)
October 20, 2003... Tracking shot, please, of a twelve-year-old boy running north on Lexington Avenue as a 1933 twilight begins to fall. He is sprinting for home, on Ninety-third Street, and guilt makes him fly. He must be there in time to get a little homework...

POLL STARS.(Arnod Schwarzenegger and other movie actors as politicians)(The Talk of the Town)
October 20, 2003... In his 1994 film "True Lies," Arnold Schwarzenegger played an agent so secret that even his wife was kept in the dark. She saw him as a drudge in a raincoat, unaware that he was summoned to save the nation on a weekly basis. How times change....

BLEACHER CREATURES.(Mike Gimbel on baseball and exotic animals)(Interview)(The Talk of the Town)
October 20, 2003... In Boston last week, after the Red Sox knocked off the A's, chaos reigned briefly outside Fenway Park. The home team was away, in Oakland, but on Ipswich and Lansdowne and Boylston Streets beer bottles flew, cars were overturned, and breasts...

WILLIAM STEIG.(Obituary)(The Talk of the Town)
October 20, 2003... William Steig, a contributor to this magazine since 1930, died the other day at the age of ninety-five, but contrived to leave a lasting impression of himself as a boy bursting with ideas and promise. His first cartoons here called upon his...

SUPER, SUPER, SUPER!(David Frost)(Interview)(Biography)(The Talk of the Town)
October 20, 2003... Nine of David Frost's fellow-students at Cambridge went on to become Cabinet ministers, but Frost took a different path. Over breakfast last week at the Regency Hotel, the sixty-four-year-old British television personality recalled one of his...

RIGHT TRADE, WRONG TIME.(Canary Capital's market timing scheme)(The Talk of the Town)
October 20, 2003... Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination they're greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly. Their frequent trades make it...

WICKED WIND.(movie sound designer Richard King)(Interview)
October 20, 2003... If you want to re-create the auditory experience of being in a storm aboard a nineteenth-century British frigate, get yourself a pickup truck, some wood, a few acoustic blankets, and about a thousand feet of rope. Then drive out to the Mojave...

THE REAL McKEE.(screenwriting instructor Robert McKee)
October 20, 2003... Robert McKee, the screenwriting instructor, was having lunch the other day at the back of a dark Irish bar on Lexington Avenue. He had just told two hundred people in a Hunter College lecture hall that there were five elements without which a...

THE ALMOST IT GIRL.(actress Jaime Pressly)(Interview)
October 20, 2003... Jaime Pressly would like to see her name in lights, and, when that happens, she would like it to be spelled correctly. Pressly, who is twenty-six, is a movie actress of considerable ambition and charm and moderate professional success. She has,...

SILENT RESPONSIBILITY.(best boy Steve Comesky)(Interview)
October 20, 2003... Best boy. You see the credit scrolling up the screen (other people in your row are shuffling their feet impatiently) and, just for a moment, you let yourself wonder about the designation. What comes to mind will probably be wrong. The best boy...

THE ART OF THE CRASH.(movie stunts)
October 20, 2003... Ever since the days of the Keystone Kops, Hollywood stuntmen have called the dangerous stuff they do "gags." A punch is a gag. A car jumping across an open drawbridge is a gag. An aerial dogfight requiring elaborate flight plans and F.A.A....

YOUR FACE IN LIGHTS.(movie lighting)
October 20, 2003... Movies intently depict the play of emotion on the human face. "Unless you're simply destroying things, eighty per cent of what we do is closeups or medium shots of the human face," a cameraman told me. Movie cameras customarily record their...

THE MOVIE LOVER.(Quenton Tarantino)(Biography)
October 20, 2003... When Quentin Tarantino goes to the movies, he sits in the front. Not in the first row, where he'd have to move his head from side to side to see what's happening in the corners, but the third or fourth row, where he can take in the whole screen...

RAGS TO RICHES.(movie costumer designer Ann Roth)(Interview)
October 20, 2003... Though Ann Roth doesn't like to toot her own horn, or pat herself on the back, or really talk about what she does at all, she will say this: she totally gets the aesthetic of the working girl, and when she dressed Melanie Griffith for the movie...

SYMPHONY IN SEE.(composer Howard Shore's score for "The Return of the King")(Interview)
October 20, 2003... On a recent Tuesday, the composer Howard Shore left his hotel in London and climbed into a black Mercedes for the forty-five-minute drive to Watford, an unromantic suburb northwest of the city. There, in the Watford Colosseum, a municipal dance...

CREDIT GRAB.
October 20, 2003... Two years ago, when James Schamus wrote a screenplay about the angry green mesomorph known as the Incredible Hulk, he had reason to believe that he could get the film made. For one thing, Ang Lee wanted to direct it, and Schamus had worked...

OBJECT LESSONS.(movie property master Peter Gelfman)
October 20, 2003... On the first day of principal photography for Marc Forster's next movie, a surreal psychological thriller called "Stay," Peter Gelfman, a property master, is overseeing a peacock and a peahen in Central Park. For the entire morning, the birds...

MY LIFE AS A PAULETTE.(movie critic Pauline Kael)
October 20, 2003... I became a follower of the New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael, or a "Paulette," as her acolytes were later derisively known, in the spring of 1969, when I answered a summons and showed up at her apartment, at Ninety-third Street and Central...

POINT-BLANK.(movie weapons coordinator Rick Washburn)
October 20, 2003... Rick Washburn, a weapons coordinator, has a disarming way of greeting people: "Are you the guy that needs the 9-millimetre?" He works out of his loft apartment, a converted doll factory in SoHo. Truncheons, scimitars, and pipes lean against one...

AFTER THE REVOLUTION.("The Dreamers")(Movie Review)
October 20, 2003... The Langlois Affair began on February 9, 1968. That was the day when Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinematheque Francaise, which he had established, in the mid-thirties, with his friend Georges Franju, and dedicated to preserving and...

HOLY TOLEDO.(El Greco, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)
October 20, 2003... "We can define El Greco's work by saying that what he did well none did better, and that what he did badly none did worse," the Spanish painter and scholar Antonio Palomino wrote in 1724. That violently mixed assessment struck me as just right...

HE SAID, SHE SAID.(Counting the Ways)(Theater Review)
October 20, 2003... For many years after the phenomenal success of his magisterial early work, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1962), the playwright Edward Albee suffered a critical reversal of fortune. Audiences that had delighted in the arch-anarchy that...

THE GENTLEMAN COMPOSER.(Ned Rorem)
October 20, 2003... Ned Rorem will not go away. For decades, he has been an elegant anomaly among American composers, adhering to an austerely lyrical Franco-American style that went out of fashion sometime during the Eisenhower Administration. He came of age in...

YOUNG BLOOD.(Sylvia)(Movie Review)
October 20, 2003... One of the more impressive things about "Sylvia," which recounts the life and death of Sylvia Plath, is the fact that the film was made at all. When I worked for the book-review section of a newspaper, we had a vague premonition that hardened...

Space Invaders.(Entering the Stone)(Chauvet Cave)(The Mind in the Cave)(Book Review)
October 27, 2003... "It's a torture chamber, I think, a too-small casket tilted foot-up and you're the one inside," Barbara Hurd writes in Entering the Stone (Houghton Mifflin). Hurd, a caver for the past ten years, describes the difficulty of crawling through...

RUSH IN REHAB.(The Talk of the Town)(Rush Limbaugh's drug addiction)
October 27, 2003... "We do not need General Clark or any of the rest of you liberals. We don't need to change the definition of patriotism in order to conform to the antiwar, hate-America-first radicalism of the Democrat leadership. And that's what this is all...

THE WRECK.(The Talk of the Town)(ferry crashes into terminal in New York, New York)
October 27, 2003... Many in the first wave of nine-to-five commuters returning to Staten Island last Wednesday learned of the day's calamity only when they'd reached the waterfront. At the South Ferry terminal, down by the Battery, where the wind was blowing fifty...

NOT LOST IN TRANSLATION.(The Talk of the Town)(Mikhail Gorbachev and cheek-kissing )
October 27, 2003... The effects of globalization notwithstanding, cheek-kissing protocol remains something of a mystery, resolved with regional pique depending on whom you meet and where you go: the Americans do it once, the Europeans twice, and the Brazilians as...

THE MAN AND THE HAND.(The Talk of the Town)(change to pedestrian signals in New York, New York)
October 27, 2003... On the one hand, pedestrians ought to be impressed by the uncharacteristic stealth with which city workers have changed most of New York's Walk/Don't Walk signals. On the other, they should be concerned; if such a radical transformation can go...

TWO FROM BERLIN.(The Talk of the Town)(artists Renata Stih, Frieder Schnock have different views of New York, New York)
October 27, 2003... The Berlin conceptual artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock stopped in New York recently to install a show at the Jewish Museum, and while they were here they spent some time at Ground Zero--and took up an old argument about what they'd do at...

END RUN AT ENRON.
October 27, 2003... In the recent era of corporate scandals, Enron remains the archetype. Toward the end of 2001, in little more than a month, the Houston energy trader went from being the seventh-ranked company on the Fortune 500 to a bankrupt shell. In response,...

MOTHER OF INVENTION.(fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli)
October 27, 2003... Elsa Schiaparelli's signature color was a violent magenta that she admired, she said, because it was "life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together, a color of China and Peru but not of the West." She...

GHOSTS IN THE HOUSE.(books by Toni Morrison)
October 27, 2003... No. 2245 Elyria Avenue in Lorain, Ohio, is a two-story frame house surrounded by look-alikes. Its small front porch is littered with the discards of former tenants: a banged-up bicycle wheel, a plastic patio chair, a garden hose. Most of its...

THE STOVEPIPE.(Seymour M. Hersh)(Interview)
October 27, 2003... In a Q. & A., Seymour M. Hersh discusses the current state of the Bush Administration Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush...

THE NATURAL.('John Clare')(Book Review)
October 27, 2003... Joyce Carol Oates on this year's dark-horse Booker Prize winner In early 1860, a poetry fan from London called James Hipkins wrote to Dr. Wing, the superintendent of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, inquiring after the welfare of...

SHOWTIME.('Vernon God Little')(Book Review)
October 27, 2003... John Lanchester on the poetry and madness of John Clare "It's hot as hell in Martirio, but the papers on the porch are icy with the news." So begins "Vernon God Little" (Canongate; $23), a frenetic yet unexpectedly moving first novel by...

TIME PIECES.(James Rosenquist, painting, Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York, New York)
October 27, 2003... The James Rosenquist retrospective now at the Guggenheim turns Frank Lloyd Wright's helix into a pinball machine. Your ambulatory gaze is the rolling ball. The paintings and the occasional sculpture are lights and bumpers, emitting tacit dings...

DOWN UNDERDOG.('The Boy from Oz,' Imperial Theater, New York, New York)(Theater Review)
October 27, 2003... By 1964, the twenty-year-old singer-songwriter Peter Allen had seemingly gone as far as an ambitious, young, white, bisexual man from small-town Tenterfield, Australia, could go. The more excitable half of the Allen Brothers, a fake-brother act...

LET YOURSELF GO.('The Rite of Spring')(Dance Review)
October 27, 2003... Once again, a choreographer has taken on "The Rite of Spring"--Doug Varone, for the Metropolitan Opera's "Stravinsky" program--and once again the result is a trifling business compared with that epochal piece of music. Though Stravinsky...

CREEP SHOWS.('In the Cut,' 'Mystic River,' 'Elephant')(Movie Review)
October 27, 2003... A blood-red New York sky at dusk, a sordid city of graffiti and trash piles, all photographed by a handheld camera that jiggles and stumbles like a drunken sailor about to hit the deck. "In the Cut," Jane Campion's adaptation of Susanna Moore's...