The New Yorker, 2006-06-19

[fiefoe]

"The Injustice Collector" / D. T. Max
__ “I am a Joyce, not a Joycean, and there is more than a nuance to that fact,” he often says. And he insists on being addressed as Stephen James Joyce, his full given name.

"Shouts and Murmurs: I'm Afraid I Have Some Bad News" / Larry Doyle
__ Of course, he catches this new hepatitis G, which makes hepatitis C look like hepatitis A,

"The Cameraman" / Hilton Als
__ Toland's technique,.. became known as "deep focus". Employed throughout the film, it heightened Welles's brooding examination of power by allowing viewers to see in a single frame all the detritus - human and otherwise - that Kane had collected in his love-starved life.

"Watching the Waterfront" / William Finnegan
__ Empty containers are the Port of New York and New Jersey’s biggest export, followed by wastepaper and scrap metal... No empty containers arrive.
__ For a pair of shoes made in China and sold in this country for fifty dollars, only about seventy-five cents of the retail cost derives from transportation. And the main costs in international shipping come from friction in the pipeline, particularly at the points of ship loading and unloading.
__ Chief Mate Du was not as impressed. Too slow, he said. In Qingdao, the crews made far more moves per hour.
__ Each gantry crane works a hatch—a cross-section of the ship—and each crane has a gang.

"Stereo Sue" / Oliver Sacks
__ people living in rain forests so dense that their far point was only six or seven feet away
__ (as in Siamese cats, often born cross-eyed).. the animals would permanently lack stereoscopy.
__ Post and American humorist Will Rogers were killed when Post's plane crashed.
__ Such "autostereograms" have probably been experienced for millennia, with the repetitive patterns of Islamic art, Celtic art..  (Lindisfarne Gospels)
__ Cuttlefish.. whose wide-set eyes normally permit a large degree of panoramic vision but can be rotated forward by a special muscular mechanism when the animal is about to attack, giving it the binocular vision it needs.

"American Sublime" / Alex Ross
__ "Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me... My concern at times is nothing more than establishing a series of practical conditions that will enable me to work. For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart."
__ “Music seems to have vanished almost to the point of extinction; yet the little that is left is, like all of Feldman’s work, of exquisite musicality; and it certainly presents the American obsession with emptiness completely absolved from fear.” In other words, we are in the region of Wallace Stevens’s “American Sublime,” of the “empty spirit / In vacant space.”

"Spanish Lessons - Picasso in Madrid." / Peter Schjeldahl
__ Picasso had faith only in himself, which makes him both heroically modern and, in his present company, a figure of relatively wizened, sour spirit.
__ His forte was linear and analytical—hard and dry. He wielded color resourcefully and keenly, to intensify contrasts, but the sensuous eloquence of real colorists, for whom meaning is inseparable from decorative effect, was outside his ken...
__ Velázquez has no discernible limits in any capacity of his art. He is Picasso plus Matisse—adept at blacks and grays as plangent as Matisse’s reds and blues.
__ Simply, no other work of a bloody century so successfully—that is, to a lesser degree of failure—apostrophizes the character of total war. If the emotionally devastating Goya and even the eerily detached Manet are far superior in conjuring lived horror, with flowing blood and choking gun smoke, it’s because they belonged to times when organized violence could still be convincingly registered in specific detail, at human scale, and painting had not yet lost its grip on external reality to photography and on historical fiction to the movies.

Anthony Lane: The shimmer of “Finding Nemo” did little to erase the fact that what swam before us was a bunch of fish—at once the loveliest and the most inexpressive creatures to grace the screen since the heyday of Hedy Lamarr.
<<