Books & the Arts

The Wind She Blows The Wind She Blows

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," some sage once wrote. Just so. As this issue went to press, the Museum of International Folk Art, a state-run insti...

May 25, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Art Winslow

Beauty and Sadness Beauty and Sadness

A tidal wave is coming. Soon I am sure. It will sweep all of us away.       --The opening lines of Eureka One of the more familiar works of Japane...

May 17, 2001 / Books & the Arts / John Anderson

Sub-Urban Planning Sub-Urban Planning

Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes--once the nation's largest public housing project--is currently being dismantled. Half of its buildings have already been torn down, and of those tha...

May 17, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Adele Oltman

Re-education on Henry Adams Re-education on Henry Adams

Henry Adams liked to say that his pedigree and eighteenth-century upbringing had hobbled him in the races of the twentieth century. The scion of not just one but two Presidents of...

May 17, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Michele Pridmore-Brown

‘The Sound of Surprise’ ‘The Sound of Surprise’

Bright and eager, bouncy and buoyant, sharp-eyed and quick-eared and passionately in love--those are a few of the ways you could describe Calle 54, director Fernando Trueba's trib...

May 17, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Gene Santoro

Indecent Proposals Indecent Proposals

When the guy I'm seeing, Dan, invited me to the Wayne Wang film The Center of the World I felt sure it would lead to a hot night. The movie poster featured a stripper licking a lo...

May 10, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Amy Sohn

In the Bosom of Jesus In the Bosom of Jesus

The almost exact coincidence in time between the destruction of the Buddha figures by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's renewed jihad against the Brooklyn Mu...

May 10, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

Suffer the Children Suffer the Children

In 1995 the brutal slaying of Elisa Izquierdo by her crack-addicted mother seized headlines. Responding to the public's outrage that city officials had ignored obvious signs that ...

May 10, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Daphne Eviatar

The Marriage of Orpheus The Marriage of Orpheus

Something brushed my cheek with damp-- a leaf, its little valley slick with run-off after rain. One last drop shook loose and struck a spider web, which shuddered but held o...

May 10, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Debora Greger

Literature’s Candida Literature’s Candida

One recent Tuesday, members of the literary old guard gathered at the Church of All Souls on Manhattan's Upper East Side to bid final farewell to one of their secret society and t...

May 10, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Dan Simon

x