Movers and Shakers: The 40 Most Exciting Soulful Artists of 2003

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Colson Whitehead
Postmodern Mythmaker
Manhattan-raised and Harvard-educated, Colson Whitehead writes fiction that visits the past, the present, and the surreal with equal effortlessness. His first novel, The Intuitionist, conjures up a Kafkaesque New York, half 1930s, half 1990s, inhabited by elevator inspectors who discuss ?the vertical imperative? and ?the dilemma of the phantom passenger.? A plucky black female inspector struggles hard to ?rise? in this world. In Whitehead?s second novel, John Henry Days, J. Sutter is a hack writer and junketeer who travels to rural West Virginia to cover the John Henry Days festival. Stutter?s humble life overlaps with an
epic retelling of the African American story of John Henry, the heroic hammer-wielder who wins a race with a steam drill, then dies.
In both books, Whitehead finds elegant and sly ways to show how modern Americans, and particularly African Americans, are caught up in a dialogue with the past?with inspiring and stultifying myths, with bits and pieces of old stereotypes and old dreams. And he does it in a literary language that recalls the work of complex literary mythmakers like Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon, adding a nimble, genial wit to the mix. John Henry Days (Doubleday) ?LAINE BERGESON

DJ Spooky
Turntable Intellectual
Some of DJ Spooky?s blissed-out fans don?t know their turntable hero is a card-carrying intellectual who can hold his own in a
discussion about double-coded language and neorationalism,
or write dense essays about
performer-photographer Mariko Mori (see p. 48) or video artist Shirin Neshat. They just know he makes remarkable audio collages intermingling hip-hop, jazz, pop, rock, ambient, and dance-club culture in ever-shifting, evocative soundscapes that are as complex as our post-postmodern world. Spooky, a.k.a. Paul D. Miller, is a former French and philosophy student who sees DJing as an art form, a sort of sound sculpture. His tools are laptop computers, turntables, myriad musical instruments, and lots of samples of music, speech, and sounds; his method is to find the aural threads running through culture and weave them into new forms. A swatch of Beethoven, a snippet of dialogue from a Hitchcock film, a blast of Public Enemy: Spooky will layer them into a cohesive whole. Spooky?s not the only one mining this cut-and-paste mother lode, but he?s one of the best, a pioneer in electronica, which he calls ?the folk music of the 21st century.?
Modern Mantra (Shadow Instinct Records)
?KEITH GOETZMAN

Shigeru Ban Mr. ingenuity
Shigeru Ban is that rarity, a socially conscious architect with a keen eye for innovation. The 45-year-old Japanese designer is equally at home at Museum of Modern Art openings and meetings of the United Nations Commission for Refugees. His Curtain Wall house, a Tokyo residence whose exterior walls are two-story white curtains that ripple in the wind, was the poster image for ?Un-Private Houses,? a 1999 MoMA exhibition on radical housing. Even more radical were his instant temporary homes for refugees?Ban spent years on the muddy roads of refugee camps around the world developing the concept. Made of industrial paper tubes, beer crates, and other common materials, they have lent both shelter and dignity to untold hundreds left homeless by the devastation of war in Rwanda and by natural disasters in Japan, Turkey, and India. His Paper Church, designed in the wake of a 1995 Kobe earthquake and built by local parishioners, has wavy walls of paper tubing lit from within. It?s become such a beacon of hope in the community that a movement is afoot to make it permanent.
www.dnp.co.jp/millennium/SB/cover_e.html ?JULIE IOVINE

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