The New Yorker, 2005-10-17, b

[fiefoe]

"The Kimono Painter" / Judith Thurman

__ Above the symphonic rumble of a moving crowd, the entrance of a kimono produced to my ear a soulful trill - like that of an archaic flute. When a wimpled num passes you on the sidewalks of Rome, she strikes the same high, fleeeting grace note.
__ "Kyoto is a funny place," Moriguchi said. "The birthplace of yuzen - but also of Nintendo."

"The Mirage" / Ian Paker

__ Near his desk were a number of mounted satellite photographs - a common decoration in Dubai, which, like a person writing a lover's name in giant letters on a beach, is smitten with the idea of its own aerial legibility.
__ He also told me that various items have been placed on the seabed to ecourage marine life. These include wrecked ships, two fighter planes, and a Russian passenger aircraft.

"Words and Pictures" / Peter Schjeldahl

__ Like life-changing poetry of yore, graphic novels are a young person’s art, demanding and rewarding mental flexibility and nervous stamina. Consuming them—toggling for hours between the incommensurable functions of reading and looking—is taxing. The difficulty of graphic novels limits their potential audience, in contrast to the blissfully easeful, still all-conquering movies, but that is not a debility; rather, it gives them the opalescent sheen of avant-gardism. Avant-gardes are always cults of difficulty—Cubism, “The Waste Land”—by which a rising generation exploits its biological advantages, of animal health and superabundant brain cells, to confound the galling wisdom and demoralize the obnoxious sovereignty of age.
__ The best first-person graphic novel to date, “Persepolis”... are by a woman, Marjane Satrapi. They suggest a number of rules for the form: have a compelling life, remember everything, tell it straight, and be very brave.

John Updike: the proud non serviam of high modernism: art for its own willful, beourgeois-baiting sake.

"Unpopular Front" / Louis Menand

__ The more radical or modernist the art and letters, the more covert the government’s participation needed to be. The State Department and the U.S.I.A. could send “Oklahoma!” around the world (and did), but they could not very comfortably arrange emergency funding to keep Partisan Review afloat, as the C.I.A. seems to have done in 1953, or promote a style of avant-garde painting offensive to congressional tastes.

<<