Word: manhattanization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Mexico is also home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, once the site of the Manhattan Project, the mother of all government secrets. Broadway Books is hoping it will have a best seller this summer with Los Alamos, a compelling and literate murder mystery from first-time novelist Joseph Kanon. Set amid the wartime development of the first atom bomb, the book has been compared to E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime for its intermingling of real and fictional characters. But a more apt comparison might be to the film Chinatown, with its small-scale moral muddles foregrounding grand-scale moral muddles...
...hands. It offers us two voyeurs, one male and moony (Mathew Broderick?s Sam), the other female and furious (Meg Ryan?s Maggie). They meet (about as uncute as any couple in the history of screwball farce) because Linda (Kelly Preston), his former fiancee, has moved into a Lower Manhattan loft with Anton (Tcheky Karyo), her former lover. Sam, an astronomer, has rigged up a camera obscura in a tumbledown tenement across from their love nest, which he uses to snark on them. Professorially, he charts the many ups and very rare downs of their affair, hoping to predict...
...Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce? by Sylvia Jukes Morris (Random House; 562 pages; $30) is the first part of what will almost certainly be the definitive biography of Luce. Despite her lady-of-the-manor ways, Luce?s beginnings were anything but grand. She was born in Manhattan in 1903, the illegitimate daughter of William Franklin Boothe, an itinerant salesman and would-be concert violinist. Clare and her older brother David were raised by their mother Anna, who, Morris tells us, supported them by part-time work as a call girl and believed that Clare?s surest...
...work of art unless the things you behold respond to something within you...Thus the whole city is alive." Of course, the greatest Modernist work of art in New York was the city itself: its impaction, strangeness, clamorous variety and scary dynamism--and rising from these, its magic. No Manhattan tower expressed all that better than the Chrysler Building, 1929, designed by William van Alen and, at more than 1,000 ft., briefly the tallest structure on earth...
Like it or not, by 1965 Manhattan was the center of Western contemporary art in terms of collecting power, museum clout, promotional and dealing skills and, not least, the amount of talent stacked up in it. The old, genteel American suspicion of the new had vanished. The circuit with the worship of newness in the larger culture had closed. The first beneficiary of this situation was Pop Art, the first wholly accessible style of international Modernism--an art about consumption that sat up and begged to be consumed. Its epitome was Roy Lichtenstein, who emerged in the '60s with...