The New Yorker, 2007-11-12

[fiefoe]

"Numbers Dept: On The Avenue" / Ben McGrath

• It costs fifty-five hundred dollars to apply for a dispensation from the ordinary grid system, known officially as a “vanity address,” from the Topographical Bureau.
• The residents of 44 West Sixty-second Street once sued the owners of 62 West Sixty-second Street, whose nifty mnemonic address comes at the expense of directional logic: it is east, not west, of No. 44. The plaintiffs were upset about missing out on pizza deliveries and Town Car pickups amid the confusion. (They lost.)
• Marginal Street... “It’s, like, the technical name for streets with no name,” he said. “But we don’t do street names. That’s the City Council.”
  

"Rough Rider" / Connie Bruck

• In an interview with several reporters for the Chicago Tribune last April, Zell summed up the arrangement with characteristic candor, saying, “It’s not going to change my life style, no matter what happens. It’s likely to change yours significantly.”
• “We were at a disadvantage—we had nobody who could rhyme,” Roth told me. “Everything stopped, we put twenty people in a room, and finally we came up with ours”:   Sam, how are you/ The rumor is true / I do love you / And the price is $52.
• “After a few glasses of wine, Sam thinks it’s hilarious to sing, at the top of his lungs, ‘If I were a rich man.’ And then he laughs and laughs.”
• Eventually, the guests disembarked at an industrial site in Indiana, where a fifty-thousand-square-foot structure had been built from six hundred corrugated-metal shipping containers, to resemble a Mayan temple. Throughout the evening, French acrobats leaped from one container to the next, opening doors to reveal scenes—a performing orchestra, a beautiful young woman in a colorful setting slowly turning a large cylinder—that were meant to evoke Joseph Cornell boxes.
  

"A Fool For Art" / Calvin Tomkins

__ They will pay $1.5 million or more for a Hirst spot painting (...Hirst has done nearly a thousand of these)
__ Larry Gagosian, the world's most powerful art dealer
__ what a droll aunt of mine used to call nudal frontity
__ Deitch, whose tolerance for transgression is probably limitless
__ "I think that the spectacular painting which alread sells itself on the printed page is what you will see being most successful in this market." ... That sounds like the see-at-a-glance accessibility of advertising art, which happens to be a prime source for the work of Koons, Prince, Murakami...

"Unforgiven" / Jeffrey Toobin

__ His reaction is a wild swing in the other direction: his anger at racism became an equally intense resentment of efforts to help African-Americans.
__ After sixteen years’ reflection, to compare the actions of Anita Hill’s supporters with those of the K.K.K. reflects an inability to draw distinctions... Thomas writes in his memoir, “Mere confirmation, even to the Supreme Court, seemed pitifully small compensation for what had been done to me.”

Peter Schjeldahl: A typical Puryear is as tensed and silent as a held breath. Its form may seem more the idea of its materials than that of its maker.

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