Vanity Fair articles from November 2005

Vanity Fair archives from November 2005

Everyone's All-American.
November 1, 2005... Byline: Aaron Gell For those who think of Tommy Hilfiger as the avatar of clean-cut, neo-preppy style, it may come as a shock that the designer's rag-trade debut was opening a boutique in his hometown of Elmira, New York, specializing in...

DAZZLING BEAUTY.
November 1, 2005... Byline: Christine Muhlke When people say that makeup artist Tom Pecheux is a feeler, they're not kidding: he greets each subject with a massage. It's this kind of sexy intuition that guides his colorful creations for Shiseido. For the...

MAKEUP TIPS FROM A STARR.
November 1, 2005... Byline: Christine Muhlke "When you're a makeup artist, there are two things you can do: create a line with a big company or write a book," says Paul Starr. Now he's done both. The director of Estee Lauder's national makeup-artist team, he...

Flooding the Spin Zone; Stunned by the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the media came out of its defensive crouch and lambasted Washington.
November 1, 2005... Byline: James Wolcott Is it too good to last? The levee break of raw candor that Hurricane Katrina let wild in the media, I mean. In the wake of Rathergate and Newsweek's shamefaced apology for the Koran-flushed-down-the-toilet story,...

Meanwhile, in an Undisclosed Location ... Just when a weakened Bush administration needs steel-plated gravitas, Dick Cheney has gone off the radar.(George W. Bush)
November 1, 2005... Byline: Michael Wolff The true helmsman of the Bush administration, its philosophical architect, its psychic heart, its blood and guts, is missing in action. He's become a media vacancy, a hole where the normal huffing and puffing of a...

The Man Who Ate Hollywood; A giant of a man, Marvin Davis lived a giant life.(Biography)
November 1, 2005... Byline: Mark Seal Marvin Davis was the biggest human being I ever met, and not just in size, though at six feet four and 300-plus pounds he was certainly that. Davis was big in every way. In 2000, when I interviewed him for Golf Digest-one...

High Noon in Crawford; President Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch was intended as a perfect backdrop for his cowboy image.(George W. Bush)
November 1, 2005... Byline: Evgenia Peretz When the 101-degree Crawford heat scorches the prairie, the dust blows through the sagebrush like a tornado, and fire ants attack your ankles like the Devil's minions, you won't see George Bush flinch. He's too busy...

Hip-Hop Happens; Released in 1979, the single "Rapper's Delight" launched hip-hop as a multi-billion-dollar phenomenon.
November 1, 2005... Byline: Steven Daly Hip-hop, hibbit to the hibbit to the hip-hip-hop and you don't stop... The moment this strange incantation bubbled up through urban airwaves in October 1979, the genie was out of the bottle. This was the vocal...

The Waiting Plague; For the epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, avian flu is potentially the greatest killer in history.
November 1, 2005... Byline: William Prochnau, Laura Parker Sun Chan Bopha died when she was 20 years old. She had been a stately young woman, strong, handsome, and industrious. But without dying, Bopha never had a chance to make a mark in the world. For...

Max Minghella.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Byline: Krista Smith AGE AND OCCUPATION: 20, actor. PROVENANCE: London. WHAT'S IN A NAME? Minghella... Minghella... sounds so familiar. What have you seen him in? Nothing yet, but prepare yourself for Max's one-two-three punch: in the...

The Wine Snob's Dictionary 2005; Oblivious to the scourge of "Parkerized" wines.(Glossary)
November 1, 2005... Byline: David Lynch, David Kamp (NOTE: Cross-references to other definitions in the dictionary are spelled out in capital letters.) Ah-So. Generic term for a two-pronged wine-bottle opener that, given it isn't technically a screw-pull...

Tab Hunter finally tells.(Interview)
November 1, 2005... Byline: George Wayne Raised Arthur Gelien in New York City in the 1930s, Tab Hunter shot to the heartthrob stratosphere in the 1950s with his blond good looks and roles in films such as Island of Desire. A frequent tabloid target, Hunter,...

Vanity Fair's Hot Tracks; WARNING: The contents of this CD may cause mood swings.
November 1, 2005... Byline: Lisa Robinson his month: a musical assemblage to raise your spirits. Emmylou Harris joins Conor Oberst for a duet on Bright Eyes' country-tinged "We Are Nowhere and It's Now." Paris/New York songwriter Keren Ann is...

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Hot Tracks.
November 1, 2005... Byline: Lisa Robinson "What we play is life." -Louis Armstrong One way to know what it means to miss New Orleans-listen to the music. The best collection is the four-CD deluxe set Doctors, Professors, Kings & Queens: The Big...

Run-DMC; The Reverend Joseph "Run" Simmons and Darryl "DMC" McDaniels.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... They came from Queens, agile-tongued and poker-faced, dressed like Hasidic diamond merchants on holiday. (DMC's blockish Cazal eyeglasses, especially, were positively 47th Street.) They rapped hard, over electro and rock beats rather than the...

50 Cent And G-Unit; Lloyd Banks, 50 Cent, Olivia, Young Buck, and Tony Yayo.
November 1, 2005... The grim details of the 50 Cent legend wouldn't mean anything to the millions if it weren't for his musical genius. No doubt his days as a large-living drug dealer, as well as the time he spent behind bars, have given him street credibility;...

Outkast; Andre "3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... The long run on the charts of Andre's hip-pop Merseybeat update, "Hey Ya!," was a galvanizing moment in radio, a throwback to music's less segregated days when the dudes in Funkadelic grooved to hippie-stoner music and the white punks of...

Missy Elliott; Rapper, songwriter, producer, best-selling female hip-hop artist of all time.
November 1, 2005... Pop has always been a man's man's man's world, to paraphrase James Brown, and rap remains one of its most male-bound precincts-which makes Missy Elliott's decade-long run as a hitmaker all the more astonishing. True, there have been female...

Common; Enlightened soul.(Be)(Sound Recording Review)
November 1, 2005... Common, the rapper from the South Side of Chicago who made a name for himself in the subgenre of "conscious" rap, is an heir to the tradition of tuneful protest music established by Bob Marley, Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye. But he hasn't...

Rick Rubin and Jay-Z; Artist-friendly entrepreneurs.
November 1, 2005... More than 20 years ago, while an 11-year-old in Brooklyn's Marcy projects was trying to make sense of his father's abandonment of his family, across the East River an N.Y.U. student was building his own record label out of a dorm room. Today,...

Chuck D; Rapper, pundit, human megaphone.
November 1, 2005... In the 1980s, with Black Power a distant memory and hip-hop a bouncing celebration of life on the streets, a graphic-design student from Long Island created a radical, militant, punk-rock-inspired rap group that set out to reach black America...

Nas; Wordsmith.(Nasir Jones)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Nasir Jones, son of jazz musician Olu Dara, was born into hip-hop before hip-hop was even born. Raised in New York City's Queensbridge projects on Rakim's rhymes and the dense break beats of D.J. Marley Marl, Nas captured his...

Kurtis Blow; Pioneering M.C. in the 1970s; pioneer of hip-hop spirituality in the 2000s.(Brief Article)(Biography)
November 1, 2005... As the leader of regular hip-hop-driven services at the Greater Hood Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church in Harlem and the Loyal Baptist Church in the Bronx, old-school pioneer Kurtis Blow has created an interesting second act for himself. Accompanied...

Lil' Kim; Hip-hop Harlow.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Lil' Kim is street-smart, street-tough, and, even with all the cosmetic enhancement, street-sexy. In her rhymes, set to intricate beats and samples expertly assembled by hip-hop's elite producers, she can be raunchy, threatening,...

Snoop Dogg and Pharrell Williams; Hip-hop polymaths, stylish gents.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Who knows where a hip-hop career can lead? Snoop crept up on us more than a decade ago as Dr. Dre's shy, loping sidekick and has somehow morphed into aughties culture's cuddly, extroverted, all-round Mr. Beloved Entertainer. As for Snoop's pal...

Grandmaster Flash; Turntable god.(Joseph Saddler)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Grandmaster Flash, ne Joseph Saddler, wasn't the first of the Bronx's pioneering block-party D.J.'s who conjured a whole new music out of old platters, but as an inventor of the D.J.'s basic vocabulary of scratching records and extending...

Russell Simmons; Impresario, executive, yoga enthusiast.
November 1, 2005... Originally from Hollis, Queens, Russell "Rush" Simmons relied on his intellect and energy to launch hip-hop nation. He quit the thug's life to manage early rapper Kurtis Blow. Before long he was guiding Run-DMC, which featured his...

Eve; Rapper, actress.
November 1, 2005... Eve is hip-hop's everything woman, a chameleon who is equally at home onstage spitting out forceful rhymes, in the front row at fashion shows, and on movie sets. As an actress, she can do drama (see The Woodsman), comedy (the Barbershop...

Mos Def and The Last Poets; Abiodun Oyewole, Umar bin Hassan, Mos Def, and Babatunde.
November 1, 2005... On the first track of his debut album, hip-hop Renaissance man Mos Def name-checked the Last Poets. Those who know Mos Def, born Dante Terrell Smith in Brooklyn, only from his performances in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Italian...

Queen Latifah; Singer, songwriter, actress, film producer, spokesperson for Cover Girl makeup and Curvation lingerie.
November 1, 2005... Queen Latifah (Arabic for "delicate") arrived on the hip-hop scene in all her funky majesty in the late 80s. Here was a new M.C. indeed-not only because she was a she (born Dana Elaine Owens) but also because she used the boast-and-dis thing to...

The Black Eyed Peas; will.(Elephunk)(Monkey Business)(Sound Recording Review)
November 1, 2005... Were there still such a thing as "selling out," the Black Eyed Peas would be Exhibit A for its virtues. First a duo, then a trio, the Peas in the late 90s were plowing a pleasant but limited furrow as a socially conscious, multi-ethnic rap...

Kanye West; M.C., producer, crossover giant.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Many Kanye West concerts used to begin with a sampling of the hottest hip-hop and R&B singles of the past and present spliced together allegro-style not because a D.J. was warming up a block party but because West, with his characteristic...

Mary J. Blige; Singer, survivor.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... She was anointed the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul even before her boundary-breaking, genre-making debut smash, What's the 411?, dropped in 1992. That she's still the Queen, 13 years and five studio albums later-despite the best efforts of any number...

Sean "Diddy" Combs; C.E.O., Bad Boy Entertainment.
November 1, 2005... Sean Combs has been called many things-Puffy, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, Shiny Suit Man, and "the black Sinatra"-but perhaps the most accurate of the lot is, as Ben Stiller noted at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards, "Puff the Magic Diddy." He has had...

Ice-T; Rapper, actor, lecturer, curator of pimp culture.
November 1, 2005... Oh, how they love to point out the contradictions inherent in Mr. Tracy Morrow, known to the world as Ice-T: married to a former porn model (the delightful Coco), but a fearsome pursuer of sex offenders in his role as Detective Odafin Tutuola...

DJ Kool Herc; Originator of break-beat D.J.-ing; the original B-boy.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Meet the founding father of hip-hop. In 1967, Clive Campbell emigrated from his original hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, to the Bronx. Influenced by the traveling disc jockeys he had seen back home, he set himself up with a booming sound system...

Ice Cube; Rapper, actor, producer, screenwriter.
November 1, 2005... Who knew? Ice Cube, who has spewed rhymed venom as well as anyone in hip-hop history, has made himself into an all-purpose entertainment machine. The transformation was completed this year when, in the crossover of all crossovers, he took the...

Beastie Boys; Adam Yauch (MCA), Adam Horovitz (Adrock), and Mike Diamond (Mike D). Cultural anthropologists, agitators for Tibetan independence, literal eminences grises.
November 1, 2005... The Beasties take so long between albums that each one seems like a triumphant comeback-whether it's their densely layered second album, 1989's Paul's Boutique, whose song "Shake Your Rump" included Mike Diamond's declamation "I'm Mike D and...

Nelly; Rapper, crooner, actor.
November 1, 2005... "It's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes," from summer 2002's inescapable "Hot in Herre," could serve as Nelly's (born Cornell Haynes Jr.) mission statement, with most of his other lyrics content to limn the pleasures of...

Fugees; Pras (Prakazrel Michel), Lauryn Hill, and Wyclef Jean.
November 1, 2005... Originality has been the defining mark of the Fugees since they came together in high school and poured a unique blend of reggae, rock guitar, and funk into hip-hop. Coupling this musical depth with intense emotion, the Fugees (short for...

Above And Beyonce; At 24, Beyonce Knowles has the determination of a veteran, the manners of a lady, and the dazzle of the biggest star to emerge from the biggest-selling female group in the world.(Biography)
November 1, 2005... Byline: Lisa Robinson Dressed in jeans, a low-cut filmy top, big hoop earrings, and strappy high-heeled sandals, Beyonce is sitting on a sofa in her assistant (and cousin) Angela's Manhattan high-rise apartment. On this sunny May...

Do Ya Think I'm Sixty? Rod Stewart's last Great American Songbook album debuted at No.(Interview)
November 1, 2005... Byline: Jim Windolf Earlier this year Rod Stewart vowed his next album of standards would be his last. But as he was putting the finishing touches on Thanks for the Memory... The Great American Songbook Volume IV, he decided to leave...

Live, From Tribeca! A neon-lit promise of excitement on Tribeca's then dark streets, the Odeon was the restaurant that defined New York's 80s: a retro haven for the likes of Warhol and Basquiat, De Niro and Belushi, with a cocaine-fueled scene captured in Bright Lights, Big City.(Panel Discussion)
November 1, 2005... Byline: Frank Digiacomo In Lower Manhattan, at the corner of West Broadway and Thomas Street, hangs a restaurant sign that functions as a kind of cultural Rorschach test. Composed not of abstract shapes but of 29-inch-high stylishly retro...

Hell and High Water American Apocalypse: New Orleans 2005; Faced with the greatest natural disaster in modern American history, Washington fumbled and failed.
November 1, 2005... Byline: David Halberstam The scenes were at once familiar and unfamiliar. Familiar because television has become expert at bringing us news of disasters-hurricanes being a particular specialty of the medium-and it does them better than...

Mike Wallace; In his more than 60 years on the air, Mike Wallace has interviewed almost every president of the last half-century and, at 87, continues to add to a list that includes Salvador Dali, Yasser Arafat, and Malcolm X. As he publishes "Between You and Me: A Memoir", the unmistakable voice of broadcast journalism speaks out about his skinny bowlegs, self-absorption, and his idol, Martin Luther King Jr.(Brief Article)(Interview)
November 1, 2005... What is your idea of perfect happiness? There's no such thing. What is your greatest fear? I don't have any left. I've already lost a son. I guess, maybe, that my wife would leave me, but she wouldn't dare. Which historical...