Art

I ONCE SAW Sandra Day O'Connor in my corner store, and years ago, before Justice O'Connor even sat on the U.S. Supreme Court, I used to push a stroller on the terrace surrounding the white marble temple where she works. But until Tuesday--even though the Court is only four blocks from my house--I'd never actually heard an oral argument there and seen the justices in session.

The case wasn't exactly exciting (at issue was the definition of "investment contract" in securities law), though it must have mattered to the administration since Solicitor General Ted Olson spoke in person.

Dancing in the Wind

Poetry and the Art of the British Isles

edited by Charles Sullivan

Harry N. Abrams, 144 pp., $29.95

Seeing Venice

Bellotto's Grand Canal

by Mark Doty

Getty Trust, 64 pp., $14.95

Poetry Comics

An Animated Anthology

by Dave Morice

Cincinnati

SOMETIME IN THE SECOND WEEK of January, Ed Stern, artistic director at Cincinnati's Playhouse in the Park, called Glyn O'Malley with an apology. "I don't think I've ever f--d a playwright over," Stern said, "the way I've f--d you." Five months earlier, the Playhouse, flagship of Cincinnati's arts establishment, had announced O'Malley as the winner of its Lazarus New Play Prize for Young Audiences. For several years the Playhouse had staged a traveling drama for high school students.

WOULD YOU CONSIDER taking two hours to see a Broadway show filled with music by an aging pop star? Some of those who grew up with Billy Joel's songs, featured in this season's hit "Movin' Out" at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, disdain the show, thinking it little more than MTV outfitted for Broadway. Others, who have greater fondness for Joel, would gladly go to hear his music performed, even if not by Joel himself.

Others focus not on Billy Joel, but on the Broadway tradition, and some reviewers have criticized "Movin' Out" on account of its plot.

CHRISTIAN MERCHANDISING TODAY has many mansions. Start with faith-on-your-sleeve fashion, such as the T-shirts promoting J.Christ instead of J. Crew, Fruit of the Spirit instead of Fruit of the Loom, Christ Supreme instead of Krispy Kreme. This "witness wear," a manufacturer's rep explains, evokes the familiar logo without quite crossing the line to trademark infringement--"We have lawyers."

A half-dozen companies produce Scripture-clad candy.

THE TRANSFORMING FLOW of money through New York has accelerated over time. Thirty years ago the SoHo area, which had been the cast-iron district and a no-man's-land of warehouses and small manufacturing, was transformed almost overnight into a casbah of lofts and galleries that formed an immense showcase for graduates of the ever-mushrooming arts-education establishment.

That growth did not abate even after SoHo had become a neighborhood priced beyond the means of all but the most established artists and galleries.

IN HER LATEST succès de scandale, "The Rage and the Pride," Oriana Fallaci forebodes darkly about the fate of the West's amassed art treasures. Surely she has not been alone in extrapolating from the destruction of the colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan--to say nothing of the World Trade Center--to a large-scale assault on the entire aesthetic fabric of civilization.

IF YOU'RE OLD ENOUGH to have voted for Bella Abzug or Ronald Reagan, then you may remember the great to-do surrounding the unveiling, in 1979, of Judy Chicago's cause célèbre, "The Dinner Party." That assemblage of thirty-nine vulviform table settings was denounced and hosannahed, the standard to whose bright stripes partisan armies marched to their Kulturkampf.

Tom Stoppard
A Life
by Ira Bruce Nadel
Palgrave Macmillan, 384 pp., $29.95

TO WRITE ONE BRILLIANT and very funny play is an accomplishment. To write two or three, as Oscar Wilde did, is extraordinary. To write five or six, as George Bernard Shaw did, is prodigious.

THE MOVIE INDUSTRY is peculiar for many reasons, among which is this: The least important and most interchangeable artists in the community (actors) are the best known and rewarded, while the most-skilled and least replaceable artists (writers and editors) are virtually anonymous. To wit: Everyone in America knows who Adam Sandler is.

THE VILLAGE OF POUNDBURY in southwest England is a conventional real estate development, in financial terms. But its residences--ranging from spacious, detached homes to little rowhouses--are built in traditional regional styles with facades of brick, stone, or stucco. An interconnected network of winding streets and lanes--a departure from the cul-de-sac paradigm that took hold in both Britain and the United States after World War II--creates picturesque views, while the limited sight-lines force cars to slow down and make the streets more pedestrian-friendly.

Stardust Melodies
A Biography of Twelve of America's
Most Popular Songs
by Will Friedwald
Pantheon, 432 pp., $27.50

THE AMERICAN POPULAR SONG was an amateur's game before the twentieth century. The only American artist to become well known exclusively as the author of lively and memorable secular ditties was Stephen Foster, who made his reputation in the 1850s. The first "hit song" as we understand the term was 1892's "After the Ball." But while we know the name of that ballad's lyricist, Charles Harris, we don't even know who wrote the music.