Vanity Fair articles from December 2005

Vanity Fair archives from December 2005

Have Some Compassion, Please!(Editorial)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Graydon Carter You really wouldn't want to be the president of the United States in this, the age of One Damned Thing After Another. There was the tsunami last December that killed more than 225,000. Late August and early...

A Writer's Life.(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2005... Thank you for publishing Marjorie Williams's brave, trenchant, and beautifully written cancer memoir, as adapted by her husband, Tim Noah ["A Matter of Life and Death," October]. Many of the glowing, richly deserved encomiums of Ms....

Hot Type.(Column)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Elissa Schappell Good people, be assured that this column is 100 percent crony-free. Not one author who has ever lent me money, or who is a dear old friend of my mother's, in the lot, which isn't to say I'm not keen to cultivate...

On the Range.(Brokeback Mountain )(Movie Review)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2005... Byline: A. M. Homes A gay cowboy movie-who'da thunk it? Both unique and universal, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain is an epic American love story. Set in the big-sky country of Wyoming and Texas, it is the tale of two down-on-their-luck...

Nude Revue.(Mrs. Henderson Presents)(Movie Review)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Aaron Gell Newly widowed and living large in 1930s London, Laura Henderson, the dotty real-life dowager played with sparkly gumption by Judi Dench in Stephen Frears's Mrs. Henderson Presents, eschews needlepoint for a more...

Best of Travel.(adventurous travelling by americans)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Victoria Mather In the best of all possible worlds the adventurer would set out with a light heart because, as Martha Gellhorn said, "Now it's happening, we're starting, we're traveling again." Since 9/11 the travel process has...

The ABC's of Jazz.(Jazz ABZ)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Richard Merkin "I love Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer," the late Bobby Short once remarked, "and when they collaborated on the score of St. Louis Woman it was almost too much of a good thing." What is certainly a very, very good...

ALL-ACCESS PASS.("All Access at the Academy Awards: Photographs by Art Streiber" exhibition)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2005... Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes of Hollywood's most glamorous awards ceremony? And exactly how the annual Oscar production, which is televised to hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide, comes together? Next month, the Academy of...

Pixar's Pieces.
December 1, 2005... Byline: Aaron Gell Little did we know, back in 1995-when the sunlight-deprived nerd posse known as Pixar, Inc., released its first feature film, Toy Story-that Buzz Lightyear's rallying cry, "To infinity and beyond!," would also turn out...

Cinematic Waves.(Surf Movie Tonite!)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Louise Rafkin For surfers of a certain age, just the title of Matt Warshaw's book of surf-movie poster art, Surf Movie Tonite!, brings memories of possibility: a packed high-school auditorium, the waft of patchouli and dope, a...

Apocalyptic Beat.(Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security )(Sound Recording Review)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Nick Tosches The War on Terror is no fun. It has brought us nothing but fear and repression. The Cold War was different. It brought fear of another kind: flamboyant paranoia. Armageddon seemed inevitable, but there was also a party...

VIRTUAL MUSEUM TOUR.
December 1, 2005... At MoOM, the Museum of Online Museums (coudal.com/moom .php), you can visit the Art Institute of Chicago and see what's new at the Musee d'Orsay, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Smithsonian, and what's old at the Museum...

Power Grid.(Todd Eberle: Architectural Abstractions"at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Daniel Kunitz Todd Eberle acknowledges that what he loves about modernist architecture, the chilly, "machine-like precision modernism threatened to bring," is exactly what puts some people off. But the luminous images in his first...

House of Cubes.(trends of nomadic architecture)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Jessica Flint The latest craze in architecture is coming soon to a city block near you. Stacked like Legos, the industrial-strength steel cargo shipping crates-which can easily be transported across the globe-are transformed into...

A JAMAICAN FIRST.(First: magazine)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Steven Daly First, puckishly billing itself "the only magazine in Jamaica," is a small-format glossy that has won a hefty cult following among the funkier echelons of the international jet set. Founded last year by 35-year-old...

Provence Dream.
December 1, 2005... Byline: Emily Poenisch The luscious beauty, skin-care, and fragrance lines of L'Occitane en Provence have tickled the senses and soothed the souls of devotees for almost 30 years. But the company's zest for la belle vie is equaled by an...

Let Them Eat Pork Rinds; Barbara Bush's comment that the New Orleans evacuation was "working very well" for the "underprivileged" got the author thinking about famous tumbril remarks, America's ruling family, and another (French.
December 1, 2005... Byline: Christopher Hitchens And even in Atlantis of the legend, The night the seas rushed in: The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves. These lines are taken from Bertolt Brecht's magnificent poem...

Kill PBS? Over My Dead Volvo! Nixon started the war against PBS, and conservatives have nursed a pathological hatred of Bill Moyers et al.
December 1, 2005... Byline: James Wolcott Why are Republican zealots (a redundancy these days) so intent on squeezing the last puff of life out of PBS? It's like smothering a frail invalid with a pillow-why bother? Anyone who watches PBS knows how creakily...

Surviving the Darkness; A fortune-teller the author consulted as a young soldier was right on the money: his 80th birthday brings a mix of gratitude for his current life and grief over losing his niece Quintana.
December 1, 2005... Byline: Dominick Dunne I always love going back to Los Angeles, because it was my home for 24 years and I have many friends there. The new restaurant everyone is talking about is the Argyle, on Sunset Boulevard, in a perfect Art Deco...

Prepared for the Worst; Indictments.
December 1, 2005... Byline: Michael Wolff Chances are you know how this turns out. But I'm writing this in mid-October and still waiting. I've just heard from a wire-service reporter that the indictments in the Valerie Plame case will be handed down in...

The Master in the Mirror.
December 1, 2005... Byline: Ingrid Sischy At a moment when the latest generation of artists appear to be concerned more with how to hook up with a prestigious gallery than with how to pull off a body of work that really nails a new view of the world, along...

American Rapture; In Tim LaHaye's best-selling thrillers, evangelical Christians are "raptured" up to heaven, leaving secular humanists to perish in an epic bloodbath.(Interview)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Craig Unger On a scorching afternoon in May, Tim LaHaye, the 79-year-old co-author of the "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic thrillers, leads several dozen of his acolytes up a long, winding path to a hilltop in the ancient...

They'll Always Have Saigon.
December 1, 2005... Byline: William Prochnau With some of the correspondents now in their 70s, the reunion had all the trappings of a last hurrah. But don't bet on it. For many of us, so young and brash back then, Saigon-don't dare call it Ho Chi Minh...

The Goldsmith Standard; Like his father, the late Sir James Goldsmith, Ben Goldsmith gambles on his passions.(Interview)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Tamasin Day-lewis We are seated in the ground-floor sitting room of a discreetly pretty family home on a quiet street behind the eternally fashionable King's Road, in Chelsea, London. The room is large, airy, and furnished...

Mountain Girl.(Michelle Williams )(Brief Article)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Carolyn Bielfeldt Clearly, Michelle Williams has never aspired to be an "It girl," because the 25-year-old invariably gravitates toward unconventional roles. A Montana native, she was always an original, graduating from high school...

The War Within the War; Returning to Baghdad, where he was embedded in 2003, the author finds the "Hellraisers" of the Third Infantry facing the challenge of training Iraq's new army.
December 1, 2005... Byline: Jonathan Foreman I first saw Baghdad on April 7, 2003, two days before the city fell, while embedded with the army's Third Infantry Division. What is now the Green Zone was recently a battleground, a post-apocalyptic wasteland. A...

Five Little Words; The 13th-century wisdom of the mystic poet Rumi is now a go-to phrase for Donald Rumsfeld and Angelina Jolie, Trick Daddy, and Al Gore.
December 1, 2005... Byline: Jim Windolf "It is what it is" has become the great American catchphrase, a mantra for an uneasy decade. Politicians like the sound of it. Hip-hoppers, businessmen, and movie stars say it all the time. It can be profound or...

William Moseley.(actor)(Brief Article)(Interview)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Krista Smith AGE AND OCCUPATION: 18, actor. PROVENANCE: Gloucestershire, England. GOOD WILL: Moseley stars in the big-screen adaptation of C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What's it like...

On the stand with Nancy Grace.
December 1, 2005... Byline: George Wayne After her fiance was brutally slain 23 years ago, Nancy Grace laid aside her dreams of being an English professor and enrolled in law school. The take-no-prisoners former Atlanta prosecutor continues her crusade on...

The Oprah Factor.(Short Story)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Jim Windolf Chapter 1: BlackBerry Blues Producers and producers' assistants searched frantically for Oprah, but they didn't think to look in the boiler room beneath the packed Chicago television studio. That's where she...

The Housekeeper Ate My Leftovers!(Brief Article)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Nell Scovell "The waves are so loud at the beach house that I have trouble falling asleep." "No, I can't turn the A.C. down. The remote to the home-automation system is too confusing." "I spend all my time planning...

The Beautiful and the Damned; After London's Daily Mirror ran front-page photos of ber-model Kate Moss doing cocaine, the 31-year-old style icon lost contracts with Burberry, Chanel, and H&M reportedly totaling close to $4 million.
December 1, 2005... Byline: Vicky Ward For Kate Moss, an evening in early September spent at the side of boyfriend Pete Doherty, the front man of the rock group Babyshambles, must have felt like just any other jam session. The 31-year-old model sat in a...

Africa in Their Eyes.
December 1, 2005... Byline: Ingrid Sischy It's no secret that so many giants of 20th-century Western art, Picasso included, can thank for inspiration the citizens of Africa and the objects they have been making for hundreds of years-some functional, some...

Reconstructing Woody; For decades, Woody Allen could do no wrong.(Interview)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Peter Biskind It's been a long time since Alvy Singer wooed Annie Hall: on December 1, Woody Allen will be 70. But while that may make his boomer audience feel old, he himself isn't giving much ground to the Grim Reaper. You can...

Mondo Dolce.
December 1, 2005... Molto sexy!" is the unofficial mantra of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, who use it to spur on their runway models from backstage. This year marks the 20th anniversary of Dolce & Gabbana, their innovative Milan fashion house, known for...

Arianna Calling! No question that Arianna Huffington is driven, but by what: Power.(Interview)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Suzanna Andrews It is another busy day at the end of another busy week for Arianna Huffington. She has been up since five a.m. on this Friday in late August, returning phone calls to the East Coast, reading the papers, and knocking...

Charles and Camilla, Together At Last; Long the silent butt of tabloid brickbats, Palace snubs, and popular derision, Camilla Parker Bowles always refused to defend herself.(Interview)
December 1, 2005... Byline: Bob Colacello Along with three or four thousand residents of Richmond, North Yorkshire, I am standing in the town square awaiting the arrival of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, who are spending one of their typical...

Maureen Dowd; For the last 10 years, Maureen Dowd has brought her audacity and acid wit to The New York Times.(Brief Article)(Interview)
December 1, 2005... What is your greatest fear? Jeb Bush 2008. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Madame X. What is your greatest extravagance? Bringing unnecessary presents for unnecessary men. What is your favorite...