The New Yorker, 2005-05-23, part 2

[fiefoe]

"Scenes From a Marriage" / Judith Thurman

• It keeps faith with an enlightened notion that refuses to die, no matter how hard its adversaries—the Versaces of the world—try to kill it, and one which we owe almost entirely to Chanel: that a woman is entitled to dress with the same dignity, comfort, and self-possession as a man.
• white cubes open on one side—are aligned in a grid against the black walls of a windowless gallery, giving visitors the illusion of strolling through the shopping streets of a bungalow colony on the dark side of the moon. {We were there, and we failed to perceive that.}
• "Balzac has invented everything," Colette wrote, and he might have invented Chanel, had she not done it with such panache herself.
• The ladies of Deauville woke up one morning to discover a shocking deficit of chic between their own clothes and la mode Chanel. It was the difference between a regime of frivolity and one of nonchalance.
• Chanel’s respect for the appearance of propriety was the adaptive trait of the orphan and shopgirl. Like Joan of Arc, another daughter of the people who acquired a large following of aristocrats, Chanel did so by outclassing them in the lists of purity.
  

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"Space Case" / Anthony Lane

__ All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation.

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