The New Yorker, 2007-10-08

[fiefoe]

"Visiting Dignitaries: Iftar" / Hooman Majd
__ “That film ("300") claimed that under Darius the Great twenty-seven nations paid tribute to Iran.” The audience hissed. “But, in a meeting I was in, I corrected that impression. ‘No,’ I said, ‘under Darius forty-two nations paid tribute to Iran!’ ”

"Our Man in Pyongyang" / Rebecca Mead
__ ‘I’m North Korean, you understand that? You know how tough we are? So when I said I had a toothache, it means that all my teeth are rotten, I got gum disease, and I have to have them all pulled out. What did you think, that I would complain about one tooth, like you?’

"Wild Thing: Rudolf Nureyev, onstage and off." / Joan Acocella

__ Almost everyone who describes Nureyev eventually compares him to an animal. They bore you to death with this, but it was true. He seemed an unleashed force, something undiscussable in the language of reason or morals.
__ Often, he would lurch through performances; at one point, he was dancing with a catheter inside his costume.
__ Kavanagh’s previous book, a biography of Frederick Ashton, was more searching, and I think that is because she truly loved Ashton, and admired him as an artist, so that she felt he could survive close scrutiny.

turnout; La Bayadère  ('kingdom of the shades')

Peter Schjeldahl: the Süleymaniye mosque, by the sixteenth-century Ottoman architect Sinan. The decisive inventiveness of every interior half-dome, pillar, arch, and bank of windows stuns. Decorative patterns push and pull the space to visceral effect... The experience certainly overshadowed that of the Biennial, though in ways that rendered the shallow, frantic show and its yuppie-ish, wine-swilling social milieu oddly cherishable in their fragility.

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