The New Yorker, 2005-04-04

[fiefoe]

"Night Visitors" / Mark Singer

    Life is, like, so unfair sometimes.
    Whatever satisfaction Alexis and her roommates might have derived from having caught the wave of an interesting new trend was offset by the heart-of-darkness horror of it.
    "It’s still not up there with roaches and rodents—in New York, that’ll always be the bread and butter—but bedbugs is a nice niche."
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"Dining Out" / Adam Gopnik

• There are two schools of good writing about food: the mock epic and the mystical microcosmic. (A. J. Liebling, Calvin Trillin, Robert Courtine vs Elizabeth David and M. F. K. Fisher)
• All artists in all fields despise all critics all the time.... Still, there are levels of loathing, as there are circles in Hell.
  
• The encyclopedia form, of brief and then longer bursts of pure weird data, only just touched by the spry hand of commentary, is irresistible, and alphabetical organization, being both hyper-orderly and completely random, is irresistible, too.
• With no other crafted thing is the line between sensation and meaning quite so quickly crossed, quite so easily extended from something felt to something known, as with food.... All art, it has been said, aspires to the condition of music. But we want some of our art to aspire to the condition of background music. What makes Mozart... essential to our lives? Is it the hours we spend, scores on knees, listening in the dark? Or the hours and hours and hours we spend with them just on, wrapped around our lives—giving them some emotion to organize that they, miraculously, do? ... Good cooking is beloved because, when it is good enough, it gives more immediate pleasure and then recedes more rapidly, more gracefully, into the metaphoric middle distance than any other cultural thing.
• An animal that eats and thinks must think big about what it is eating not to be taken for an animal.
• Metaphor is social and shares the table with the objects it intertwines and the attitudes it reconciles. Opinion, like the Michelin inspector, dines alone.
  

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"Young Fun" / Peter Schjeldahl

    In terms of style, what Julian Schnabel performed with operatic bombast, David Salle with theatrical gall, and any number of others with academic irony, Basquiat brought off with spontaneous conviction.

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