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The Times' Sunday paper, always an adventure.

What the Times calls 'exotic' is always the same

Yemen’s Exotic Secrets, headline writer's name not known. The article is forgettable (Tom Downey manages to write about Yemen while talking to and citing only fellow Westerners), what's interesting is this list of Travel articles where the Times uses the word exotic--they're always non-white countries, and in a city that's 60% immigrant or children of immigrants, it's ridiculous that places like 'the Middle East', China, Thailand, Brazil, etc. get labeled "Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange."

You forget the Nazis were great patrons of classical music

Anthony Tommasini, A Patience to Listen, Alive and Well: In recent years a spate of articles and books have lamented classical music’s tenuous hold on the popular imagination and defended its richness, complexity and communicative power. I’m thinking especially of the book “Why Classical Music Still Matters” (University of California Press, 2007) by Lawrence Kramer, a professor of English and music at Fordham University.

Just this month classical music emerged as pivotal to international relations. With the blessing of the State Department, the New York Philharmonic announced that it would present a concert in North Korea during its Asian tour in February. Some consider this plan an outrage that will allow a totalitarian regime to use the Philharmonic musicians as puppets for propaganda. Others see it as at least a chance to pry open a door and share Western culture with a closed society, which is pretty much my view.

Either way, implicit in this plan is the idea that classical music matters. It’s not a sports team or pop group that has been enlisted to begin a thaw with the government in Pyongyang. It’s the musicians of a premier American orchestra.

What effect might this concert have on an audience in a repressive society? To Professor Kramer, as he recently told The New York Times, classical music by definition “is addressed to someone who has a certain independence of mind.” It “almost posits for its audience a certain degree of Western identity, which includes that sense of individual capacity to think, to sense, to imagine.”

At some point, they'll just call it looking out the window

Matthew Gurewitsch, Learning to Move Under the Sea, on Wheels: Two years ago Mr. Mear was pondering the challenge on a Christmas visit to Disneyland, when a little boy walked by and then all of a sudden whizzed away. “I literally chased after him and asked his parents what he was wearing on his feet,” Mr. Mear said. That was his first exposure to Heelys, the shoes built with a wheel in the heel, now ubiquitous at every mall and playground. As Ms. Zambello said: “Serendipity guides you. More ideas come walking down the street than from sitting in think tanks.”

By his own account Mr. Mear was mesmerized. “You can walk,” he said. “You can glide. You can turn. You can spin. You can jump. Once I saw them, I knew.” ...

Recreating that “Eureka!” moment in Disneyland, 12-year-old Cody Hanford, as Flounder, whizzed in from the sidelines to join the multiracial, multicultural sextet of Ariel’s mersisters in the sassy number “She’s in Love.”

“We didn’t just want to have tall, skinny girls,” Mr. Mear said from the sidelines as the women ran their engines, one of them with the curves and charisma of a junior Jessye Norman. “We wanted bodies of all shapes and sizes. That way, people relate: ‘If they can do that, so can I.’ We chose people for their personalities. You can’t beat character.”

Let them? How about howled for blood

Manohla Dargis, War Stories, What’s really been shocking about this year, though, aren’t the idiocies of “Hostel: Part II,” but rather the rage radiating off the movie screens. Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” about American soldiers who rape and murder an Iraqi girl (and her family), falls short in many ways, but the director’s anger is itself a tonic. I think that Mr. De Palma’s focus is misplaced — you can certainly blame these soldiers, though the tougher film would blame people like us, who let them be sent to Iraq — yet I am grateful for his fury. Just as I am heartened by the anger of Sidney Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” each a savage moral reckoning of the contemporary American soul.

He's Scottish. Not that you can tell from the article

Rebecca Milzoff, A Sampler of Roles: It's not every young actor who, free of a rigorous schedule of interviews, takes his father and sister along for an evening on the town. Then again, Khalid Abdalla, the 27-year-old star of the new film adaptation of “The Kite Runner,” has not followed the path most traveled in his career.

Last year, Mr. Abdalla (who is of Egyptian descent and grew up in Scotland and England) played a terrorist in “United 93,” the Paul Greengrass film about the 9/11 attacks. In “The Kite Runner,” Mr. Abdalla stars as Amir, an Afghan writer who has moved to the United States but is haunted by memories of his native country.

Composite photos from Marc Jacobs' 'Arabian Nights' event from the Times, as compiled by Bill Cunningham