The New Yorker articles from October 2005

The New Yorker archives from October 2005

TABLES FOR TWO.(Convivium Osteria)
October 3, 2005... CONVIVIUM OSTERIA -- 68 Fifth Ave., at St. Mark's Pl., Brooklyn (718-857-1833)--This almost too perfect evocation of a Mediterranean osteria seems straight from the pages of a romance novel--the sultry amber light, the dusty wine bottles and...

UNBURIED TREASURE.(Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane's Jazz performances)
October 3, 2005... UNBURIED TREASURE -- By now it seems plausible to imagine that every musical performance since the age of Edison was recorded, even the most obscure and most fabled. Jazz fans have long been obsessed with the pianist Thelonious Monk's...

RAIN AND FIRE.(The Talk of the Town)("Last Best Chance"'s screening)
October 3, 2005... Movie screenings in private theatres for invited audiences, with drinks, canapes, and opportunities to schmooze with stars and directors, are a favorite tactic of the Manhattan branches of Hollywood's publicity machines. The goal is to generate...

FENDER BENDER.(The Talk of the Town)(Saab Guy and Michael Schur's charitable donations)
October 3, 2005... One afternoon a few weeks ago, Jennifer Philbin, a writer for "The O.C.," was driving her BMW in heavy traffic on Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles, when she passed the remnants of an accident. She turned to look and promptly ran into the car...

A BETTER LIFE.(The Talk of the Town)(Roustam Tariko of Russian Standard Company and Russian Standard Bank)
October 3, 2005... Roustam Tariko, a forty-three-year-old, six-foot-three Russian entrepreneur, introduced his Imperia vodka here earlier this month with a party for a thousand guests at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. "I just like people--many, many...

WHAT RIDERS READ.(The Talk of the Town)(Housing Works Bookstore Cafe's Meredith Blum and Gordon Moore )
October 3, 2005... The other day, Meredith Blum and Gordon Moore went to Penn Station to collect twenty-four boxes of books from the Lost Property Unit of New York City Transit. The books had been left on trains and buses and in subway stations. Blum and Moore...

DEPT. OF HOOPLA.(The Talk of the Town)
October 3, 2005... Half a dozen men and women were sitting around a table at Enjoy!!!, a tea room in Ossining, New York, the other day when a stretch limousine pulled up. Out stepped Peter Falk, in from the West Coast to promote a new movie and to spend an...

HIGH WATER.
October 3, 2005... On September 10, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson had lunch in the Roosevelt Room--the "Fish Room," as F.D.R. called it--with several aides and half a dozen ambassadors of modest-sized countries. Then he returned to the Oval Office for a routine...

COUNTDOWN.(nuclear weapons)
October 3, 2005... At the northern end of the White Sands Missile Range, in the semi-arid desert of central New Mexico, a road stretches toward the charcoal-colored rockface of the Oscura Mountains, which rise to nearly nine thousand feet. At the end of the road...

COAL TRAIN--I.(CTSBT)
October 3, 2005... "C" was for coal train, "TS" for power in the Tennessee Valley, and "BT" for Black Thunder Mine. CTSBT was the proper name of the train, in the way that Broadway Limited, Burlington Zephyr, Super Chief, and Florida East Coast Tamiami Champion...

MOTHER LOVE.(Medea)(Theater Review)
October 3, 2005... If Medea were tried on Court TV today, would we forgive her? Would the psychiatrists and feminists called to the stand in her defense try to justify her crime--the murder of her two young sons--by attributing it to postpartum depression or to...

HUNTING DICKENS.(Oliver Twist)(Theater Review)
October 3, 2005... One afternoon near the end of Charles Dickens's life, his son Charley was sitting in the library at home when he heard a commotion. Alarmed by the screams, he hurried out expecting to find a fight, only to discover his father, hard at work. The...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, Mark Twain, The City of Falling Angels, The Pitcher Shower)(Book Review)
October 3, 2005... The City of Falling Angels, by John Berendt (Penguin Press; $25.95). In his first book since the success of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," more than a decade ago, Berendt follows the same formula: he explores a mysterious, derelict...

STRANGE FITS OF PASSION.(William Wordsworth's poetry)(Critical Essay)
October 5, 2005... Has there ever been a great poet as tempting to laugh at as William Wordsworth? The tradition of mocking him is as old as the tradition of revering him. In 1807, when Wordsworth published "Poems, in Two Volumes," the fashionable reviewers...

EVERYBODY'S AN EXPERT.
October 5, 2005... Prediction is one of the pleasures of life. Conversation would wither without it. "It won't last. She'll dump him in a month." If you're wrong, no one will call you on it, because being right or wrong isn't really the point. The point is that...

COMPANY MAN.('Syriana'- motion picture)
October 5, 2005... "Syriana," Stephen Gaghan's tense, outrageously complicated thriller about oil, the C.I.A., and the Middle East, is a major film without being a great film. It's a strange movie, and a stunningly pessimistic one, and the strangeness and...

TABLES FOR TWO.(Maremma)(Restaurant Review)
October 10, 2005... MAREMMA -- 228 W. 10th St. (212-645-0200)--How is it that no one thought of a Spaghetti Western restaurant before? This earnest, weird little place is named for the arid part of Tuscany where Sergio Leone filmed his raw horse operas....

DVD NOTES.(Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection)(Video Recording Review)
October 10, 2005... GET HITCHED -- In addition to such acknowledged masterworks as "Vertigo," "Psycho," and "The Birds," "Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection" (Universal), a new treasure chest of fourteen of Hitchcock's films, contains several others...

REBUILDING.(The Talk of the Town)
October 10, 2005... The prospect of rebuilding New Orleans is turning into a Rorschach test that reveals more about people's preconceptions and predilections than about what will make the city work again. When President Bush strode across a klieg-lit Jackson...

DOCTOR DOORMAN.(The Talk of the Town)(Doormen, book)
October 10, 2005... When Peter Bearman, a professor of sociology, moved from North Carolina to New York, seven years ago, to take a post at Columbia, he found his new colleagues unusually arrogant and difficult, even for the Ivy League. After considering other...

STILL RUNNING.(The Talk of the Town)
October 10, 2005... A quick recap of the mayoral campaign thus far: Gifford Miller, the City Council speaker and the Democrats' top fund-raiser, received fewer Bronx votes in last month's primary than did a man (Christopher Brodeur) who spent less than two hundred...

PIGSKIN POET.(The Talk of the Town)
October 10, 2005... This season, ABC will air its final broadcast of "Monday Night Football," the thirty-six-year-old marquee franchise. It's been an entertaining run. From the rantings of Howard Cosell (he eventually left the show, after referring to a black...

WHEN PAIN REMAINS.
October 10, 2005... Nearly everyone has stubbed a toe or skinned a knee. The pain may be severe, but most of the time it is fleeting. In some people, however, the pain persists for months, even years, and becomes debilitating. On a balmy evening about a year ago,...

THE ZOMBIE HUNTERS.
October 10, 2005... One afternoon this spring, a half-dozen young computer engineers sat in the headquarters of Prolexic, an Internet-security company in Hollywood, Florida, puzzling over an attack on one of the company's clients, a penileenhancement business...

FAULT LINE.(John S. Carroll, Los Angeles Times)
October 10, 2005... By the morning of July 20th, after months of gossip, everyone in the third-floor newsroom of the Los Angeles Times knew that John S. Carroll, who had been the newspaper's editor for five years, was going to resign. Through the large glass...

COAL TRAIN--II.
October 10, 2005... (An armadillo is a van sent out on highways to replace train crews whose regulated hours of service have run out. Dick Eisfeller makes and sells Warholian movies of freight trains. Scott Davis is an engineer, Paul Fitzpatrick a conductor. Their...

EARLY MUSIC.(Short Story)
October 10, 2005... As soon as he came in the front door, Rodney went straight to the music room. That was what he called it, wryly but not without some hope: the music room. It was a small, dogleg-shaped fourth bedroom that had been created when the building was...

GETTING IN.
October 10, 2005... I applied to college one evening, after dinner, in the fall of my senior year in high school. College applicants in Ontario, in those days, were given a single sheet of paper which listed all the universities in the province. It was my job to...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Truth and Consequences, The Year of Magical Thinking, Henry Adams and the Making of America, Made in Detroit)(Book Review)
October 10, 2005... Truth and Consequences, by Alison Lurie (Viking; $24.95). Like Lurie's "The War Between the Tates," this is a comedy of adultery with a comedy of academia thrown in. Alan, a professor of architectural history at a college that sounds like...

EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES.(Fiona Apple)(Extraordinary Machine)
October 10, 2005... Fiona Apple's public image was minted in 1997, when she appeared in a video for "Criminal," a song from her triple-platinum debut album, "Tidal," slinking around miserably in her underwear and looking like an underfed Calvin Klein model. That...

SEEING THINGS.(The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, exhibition)
October 10, 2005... Spirit photography, which flourished between the late eighteen-sixties and the nineteen-thirties, was an exercise in blind faith and outrageous fraud. The Civil War in the United States and, a few years later, the Franco-Prussian War, in...

DEATH BECOMES HER.(Colder Than Here)(Fran's Bed)(Theater Review)
October 10, 2005... Read side by side, Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death" and Elaine Scarry's "The Body in Pain" offer remarkably clear-eyed views into the nature of change and the way pain shapes the mind and soul of the sufferer. Each of these works suggests...

GETTING THE STORY.(Capote)(Good Night, and Good Luck)(Movie Review)
October 10, 2005... From September 25, 1965, part one of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." Movie Listings The Film File On November 15, 1959, while luxuriating in abundant literary and social success in New York, the young Truman Capote was called to...

TABLES FOR TWO.(Tides)(Restaurant Review)
October 17, 2005... TIDES -- 102 Norfolk St. (212-254-8855)--Tides may seem like just another symptom of the Lower East Side's loss of local color, with its sleekly elegant interior and sophisticated seafood. But Steven Yee, a co-owner with Allen Leung and the...

POP NOTES.(Stevie Wonder's new albums)
October 17, 2005... THE WONDER STUFF -- Stevie Wonder will probably never again have the definitive cultural authority he had in 1976, when he released "Songs in the Key of Life." Granted, little of the music he has made since then has matched that album for its...

QUAGMIERS.(The Talk of the Town)(Harriet E. Miers)
October 17, 2005... It's early yet, but plumbing the depths of Associate Justice-to-be (or not to be) Harriet E. Miers, if there are any, promises to have more in common with archeology than with law. Figuring out who she is, and what she would be likely to bring...

ELEVATOR HACK.(maintanace)
October 17, 2005... No one much likes it when something--an empty cab, an out-of-service subway train, summer--goes by without stopping. It's like a tiny taste of death. This thought came to mind recently when a rumor surfaced about a clever elevator trick....

DANIEL, IN MASS.(The Talk of the Town)(Daniel Lippman, Ask the White House)
October 17, 2005... Daniel Lippman spent the summer at his parents' house, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, balancing light proofreading duties at the community newspaper with the more demoralizing demands of a grocery-store clerkship. Daniel is fifteen. He had...

AT SEA.(The Talk of the Town)(Current Taxi, river boat service)
October 17, 2005... In theory, the Tide and Current Taxi was supposed to work like this: You'd call Marie Lorenz, the volunteer dispatch officer, ship's pilot, and all-around free spirit, and tell her where you wanted to go--not right away, because tides and...

CASH FOR CANVAS.(The Talk of the Town)
October 17, 2005... In 1904, Andre Level, a French financier, persuaded twelve other investors to contribute two hundred and twelve francs apiece to a new investment fund called La Peau de l'Ours ("the skin of the bear"), which was targeted at an unusual market:...

UNFINISHED BUSINESS.(Jorn Utzon, architect, Sydney Opera House)(Interview)
October 17, 2005... Fifty years ago, the state government of New South Wales, in Australia, announced a competition for the design of an opera house to occupy a sandstone headland in Sydney Harbour. Two hundred and thirty-three entries were submitted, of which the...

WORDS AND PICTURES.
October 17, 2005... You can tell the graphic-novels section in a bookstore from afar, by the young bodies sprawled around it like casualties of a localized disaster. There were about a dozen of them at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square one recent afternoon, in a...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, Eero Saarinen, Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side and Fresh Fruits)(Book Review)
October 17, 2005... Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, by Gita May (Yale; $30). Vigee Le Brun became a famous portraitist while still in her twenties, and was a favorite of Marie-Antoinette. May's biography seeks to rescue her from critics who have dismissed her as an...

DECEPTIVELY CONCEPTUAL.
October 17, 2005... Book covers and jackets might seem to hover beneath serious critical notice, but nothing human is alien to the academic discipline called "cultural studies," be it baseball cards or vampire movies or female footgear. All such devices open...

UNPOPULAR FRONT.(Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century)(Book Review)
October 17, 2005... Was Jackson Pollock a weapon in the Cold War? There is a lot of barbed wire surrounding that question. The Cold War had battlegrounds all over the world, and it was a hot enough war in some of them, but in the main battleground, Western Europe,...

SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.
October 17, 2005... It may be that the future of American housing is visible on a seventy-acre farm in Perryville, Missouri, a town of some eight thousand people in the rolling hills of the southeastern part of the state. The farm is owned by Rocio Romero, a...

OLD HAT.(A Naked Girl on the Appian Way)(Theater Review)
October 17, 2005... How many times will we have to put up with her--that gnomelike old crone, usually in some form of tracksuit, whose potty-mouthed utterances silence all interlocutors? She has caused trouble and strife without blinking an eye in countless films...

BEST FRIENDS.
October 17, 2005... If Jessica Alba can have a successful movie career, why can't plasticine? Both are delicately molded, pliably expressive, and, after a while, surprisingly warm to the touch. Ms. Alba, however, may lack the emotional range, the fire in the...

TABLES FOR TWO.(Bruno Jamais )
October 24, 2005... BRUNO JAMAIS -- 24 E. 81st St. (212-396-3444)--Three years ago Bruno Jamais, who'd been fired as the maitre d' at Daniel, decided to start an elegant clubhouse for his old clients--"men who are presidents and chairmen of huge companies," he...

GAME PLAN.(The Talk of the Town)
October 24, 2005... Nine months ago, Inauguration Day in Washington had all the trappings of a coronation. Karl Rove, the President's blandly smiling Richelieu, told gatherings of partisans that George W. Bush's three-per-cent margin of victory was a mandate for...

RARE AIR.(The Talk of the Town)(training of mountaineers)
October 24, 2005... There isn't much a guy can do to improve his physical fitness while sitting all day at a desk, except maybe to squeeze a rubber ball, jiggle a leg, or eat a lot of bananas. This was the problem that confronted Richard Wiese, the president of...

HARRIET 4 JUSTICE.(Harriet Miers)
October 24, 2005... Last week in this space, readers learned about a feature on the official White House Web site titled Ask the White House, an "online interactive forum where you can submit questions to Administration officials and friends of the White House."...

BED BATH & BOWERY.(new headquarters of the New Museum of Contemporary Art)
October 24, 2005... Last Tuesday morning, the empty lot at 235 Bowery (the former site of Bowery Parking, LLC) looked, despite a vestigial chain-link fence, fit for a garden party. To protect guests from the rain, a tent had been erected; beneath it were rows of...

DRAWING PITCHERS.(baseball)
October 24, 2005... Michael Witte, an illustrator, enjoys his work but finds that the artist's life can be lonely. So, a few years ago, to relieve the monotony of his days, he installed a twenty-seven-inch television in his attic studio overlooking the Hudson...

THE FIRST CONSERVATIVE.(Peter Robert Edwin Viereck)
October 24, 2005... In the winter of 1940, The Atlantic Monthly invited Peter Viereck, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who had won the college's top essay and poetry prizes, to write about "the meaning of young liberalism for the present age." Viereck...

QUIET DEPRAVITY.(Sarah Silverman )
October 24, 2005... The comedian Sarah Silverman exerts a kind of mesmeric control over an audience. She doesn't laugh at her own jokes, and when she smiles it is deliberately inappropriate. The expression that lingers on her face is usually one of tentative...

WHAT MONEY CAN BUY.
October 24, 2005... Each May, representatives from the hundred and ninety-two member nations of the World Health Organization travel to Geneva to set policies for the coming year. The assembly lasts a week, and the delegates often find themselves devoting as much...

PEOPLE POWER.(The Rise of American Democracy)
October 24, 2005... In 1938, if you had a dollar and seventy-two cents, you could buy a copy of "The Rise of American Democracy," a seven-hundred-page hardcover about the size of a biggish Bible or a Boy Scout handbook. While a Bible's worth is hard to measure,...

TURNED ON.(evolutionary developmental biology)
October 24, 2005... If you read much popular science, you'd be forgiven for thinking that biology has become something of a banana republic. A seemingly endless series of books and newspaper articles reports that biology is being roiled by any number of...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Vita)(Veronica)(A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599)(The Tender Bar)(Book Review)
October 24, 2005... Vita, by Melania G. Mazzucco, translated from the Italian by Virginia Jewiss (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25). Mazzucco's intermittently commanding and moving epic about the Italian immigrant experience tells the story of two children from a...

BIG MAC.(Commander in Chief)
October 24, 2005... Although "Commander in Chief," the new ABC series starring Geena Davis as the first woman President, is a hit on its own merits (merits that include a satisfying element of soap opera), it may get an extra shot of ratings oxygen from the...

FRESH FACES.(New York City Opera )
October 24, 2005... New York City Opera opened in February, 1944, at the height of the battles of Anzio and Truk. If skeptics thought it frivolous to start an opera company in the middle of a world war, Fiorello LaGuardia straightened them out: the music-loving...

PAPER TIGER.(Michael Flatley)(Celtic Tiger)
October 24, 2005... In 1999, Michael Flatley, the Irish-American step dancer, launched a new production by rising from the depths of a fiery lake on the grounds of a German castle. In his current show, "Celtic Tiger," which stopped for one night at Madison Square...

FAMILY MATTERS.
October 24, 2005... When little kids look up, they see gods hovering over them. Parents are big, they make things appear and disappear, and they know just about everything, which is one reason kids keep secrets and tell lies--they need to claim a little power for...

DVD NOTES.(The Val Lewton Horror Collection)(Video Recording Review)
October 31, 2005... SCARE TACTICS -- "Shadows in the Dark," the documentary accompanying the terrific new DVD boxed set "The Val Lewton Horror Collection" (Warner Home Video), sets up Lewton and Orson Welles as opposites, with Welles the extravagant director of...

SADDAM ON TRIAL.(The Talk of the Town)
October 31, 2005... In different circumstances, the image of Saddam Hussein and seven other Baath Party officials sitting inside the defendants' corrals of a Baghdad courtroom would have been a simple tableau of justice. On October 19th, they heard charges and...

HARRIET'S SUMMER OF LOVE!(The Talk of the Town)(Harriet Miers)
October 31, 2005... In February of 1969, Susan Elizabeth Reese, a first-year student at Harvard Law School, went to hear a speech by Melvin Belli, the San Francisco lawyer. At a reception afterward, she met Belli, and he ended up offering her a summer job. His...

WHITE SOX NATION.(The Talk of the Town)
October 31, 2005... Baseball, a year past the lifting of the Curse of the Bambino, the end of the Evil Empire, and the redemption of Red Sox Nation, has come up with a World Series so free of overtones that the games themselves may have to provide the...

WE DO.(The Talk of the Town)(Maryann Reid, mass wedding)
October 31, 2005... Maryann Reid, the engineer of Marry Your Baby Daddy Day, is neither married nor a parent. But she is an old-fashioned romantic. Although she writes fiction of the single-girl-in-the-city variety for a living (recent titles include "Sex and the...

CAPITOL GAINS.(The Talk of the Town)(Bill Frist, insider trading)
October 31, 2005... Earlier this year, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told the trustee in charge of managing his stock portfolio to sell all of his shares in Hospital Corporation of America, the giant company founded by the Senator's father and brother. Just...

BREYER'S BIG IDEA.(Stephen G. Breyer, Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution, book)(Interview)
October 31, 2005... In the weeks after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Bush v. Gore, on December 12, 2000, the mood was despondent in the chambers of the Justices on the losing side. The five-to-four ruling ended the recount of the Presidential vote in...

RECALLED TO LIFE.(Patricia H., aphasia)
October 31, 2005... Patricia H. was a brilliant and energetic woman who represented artists and ran an art gallery on Long Island, and was a talented amateur painter herself. She had raised her three children, and, nearing sixty, she continued to lead an active...

BREAKING RANKS.(Brent Scowcroft)
October 31, 2005... At eight o'clock on the morning of August 2, 1990, President George H. W. Bush assembled his National Security Council in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Thirteen hours earlier, Saddam Hussein had sent his Army into Kuwait, and the...

HOMER'S WARS.(Winslow Homer)(Biography)
October 31, 2005... The American artist Winslow Homer is back in style, but not yet back in the bigger picture. With the end of the Hundred Years' War of the Real--the battle between abstraction and representation that raged through the twentieth-century art...

THE SPANISH PRISONER.(The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles)(Book Review)
October 31, 2005... There was a moment, in April of 1937, when the Lost Generation of nineteen-twenties Paris reunited in Madrid. The occasion was the Spanish Civil War, already in its ninth month, but the regular shelling of the Hotel Florida and other privations...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(Mission to America)(The Days of Abandonment)(New York Burning)(The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth)(Book Review)
October 31, 2005... Mission to America, by Walter Kirn (Doubleday; $23.95). Kirn's satirical novel follows two young men who are dispatched from a cloistered religious community in rural Montana to recruit converts from present-day America. As they gorge on junk...

RACE RECORDS.(A Soldier's Play)(Absurd Person Singular)(Theater Review)
October 31, 2005... "The realization that Negroes are no better nor no worse, and at times just as boring as everybody else, will hardly kill off the population of the nation," Zora Neale Hurston wrote in a 1950 essay calling for a new kind of storytelling to...

TROUBLEMAKERS.(Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang)(North Country)(Movie Review)
October 31, 2005... On the edge of MacArthur Park, in Los Angeles, a young woman runs across the traffic, after dark, dressed in a sawn-off Santa suit trimmed with tufts of fur. Her other accessories include festive red panty hose and a loaded gun. Her name is...