The emerging beauty industry played on the fear of looking ugly as much as on the pleasure of looking beautiful, drawing on the new science of psychology to convince women that an inferiority complex could be cured by a dab of lipstick. Even then, ruthlessness and outright quackery lurked behind the façade. On launching her famous eight-hour cream, developed for her horses, Arden quipped: “I judge a woman and a horse by the same criteria: legs, head and rear end.”

Posted by GeeTee at May 26, 2003 06:32 AM | TrackBack 0

Bowling for Columbine violated the Academy's own rules. These limit the documentary competition to nonfiction films. Bowling isn't nonfiction. Whenever it was necessary to his theme, Moore invented facts, fabricated events, staged scenes, or doctored the depiction of what actually happened. When Heston, for example, gave a mild and concilliatory speech, Moore simply edited the footage (and inserted footage from a different speech a year later) to make it sound arrogant.

Posted by GeeTee at May 26, 2003 06:28 AM | TrackBack 0

Even though either option could have been too risky to carry out, their existence contradicts earlier claims by NASA officials that there was nothing they could have done to save the crew. Gehman said those rescue options make decision by NASA not to seek spy satellite images of the shuttle "even more ominous."

Posted by GeeTee at May 26, 2003 04:46 AM | TrackBack 0

Since I started with Evelyn Waugh, I should acknowledge that there is one brilliant moment in Kimmelman's piece that, though inadvertent, is worthy of Waugh at his most comic. It comes in the course of his interview with Leonard Riggio. "I went to Marfa and Roden Crater and visited Heizer in Nevada," Riggio recalls, "and I thought these artists recognized the genius of the average American. Judd built his museum in a little Texas town. [James] Turrell was hiring Native Americans from the area. Heizer was working with local people." In other words, we are supposed to regard Judd's aluminum boxes or Heizer's giant slabs in the middle of nowhere as art for the people, just as Barnes & Noble bookstores are "for average citizens, for the whole of society." It would be an art work worthy of Dia to try out, say, the room full of dirt on a randomly selected group of average citizens. I hope I am invited to witness the result.

Posted by GeeTee at May 26, 2003 03:33 AM | TrackBack 0

Yes, the woman writer deserves a lover, someone to answer the letters and arrange the cookies on the platter, to remember names and encourage when the day has not gone well; someone to lean on when the reviewers attack, when the publisher grows gruff or the work stale or the bills need paying. But we have questions, even if we don't ask them aloud, about those males who nurse successful female artists: are they angry at the role that has befallen them, do they take vengeance in subtle or not so subtle ways? Are they tempted to burn letters like Andre Gide's bitter cousin, or to misfile a poem or two? Yet we have them, these husbands of woman writers, these saints of support and inspiration. In fact we have had them in ages far less kind to woman's ambitions than the one we live in now.

Posted by GeeTee at May 26, 2003 03:25 AM | TrackBack 0