William Saletan, who must have just a bit of a nicotine jones, gives an extended if not long-winded thumbs up to the latest thing in club gear, electronic cigarettes. I’m not interested enough to actually figure out how the damn things work, but Saletan, who earlier waxed eloquent on new smokeless tobacco products that “consist…
Early Monk—“Blue Monk”
The famous “Sound of Jazz” clips of Monk. The show aired December 8, 1957. This is the earliest footage I know of Monk, and he’s still wearing period “bebop” attire. Monk was mightily irritated that Count Basie decided to insert himself in the proceedings. I reviewed an early, cheap version of a “Sound of Jazz”…
The new, improved Doonesberry! Now with Anti-Semitism added!
Okay, I don’t think that Gary Trudeau thinks of himself as an anti-Semite, but the May 31 Doonesberry slides into some awfully unattractive territory. Boopsie’s daughter Samantha starts quizzing Rev. Sloan on the old Protestant riff that the God of the Old Testament is a God of Wrath, while the God of the New Testament…
Rock n’ Roll all night long. All night long.
The New York Times begins a seven-part series on master Vermeer forger Han van Meegeren. Yeah. That Han van Meegeren.
When Reagan Killed Bernstein
Michael O’Donnell, writing in the Washington Monthly, takes down Barry Seldes’s Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician, which blames Lennie’s artistic collapse on the election of Ronald Reagan, rather than booze and boys. Well, it’s a theory. Via Arts and Letters (again).
Let them wear Nikes
Nice piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Mara Hvistendahl on “The Great Forgetting: 20 Years After Tiananmen Square”, via Arts & Letters. Seen largely through the eyes of Kang Zhengguo, author of Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, who participated in the famous demonstrations, the article describes how the Chinese government dealt…
The bad news is that the bank is foreclosing; the really bad news is that Megan McArdle is writing an article about you
Poor Edmund Andrews, a once-happy economics reporter for the New York Times. Not so long ago, Ed went through a mid-life crisis, divorcing (expensively) his first wife and re-marrying. Despite a settlement that effectively cut his take-home pay in half, and despite a new wife whose money-management skills, and her work ethic, both seemed dubious,…
Knocking Flannery Around
The publication of Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor has prompted a number of excellent essays about Flannery on the web (see Christopher Benfey here and Joseph O’Neill here ). I was pleased to see Flannery treated with less than reverence by both writers. Stories like “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”…
An ignominy of Democrats
Nancy Pelosi’s notorious “I never said I didn’t know the CIA was waterboarding I only said I didn’t know about it when they said I knew about it” press conference wasn’t quite as bad as lot of people are saying. (You can view it here.) Unfortunately, Nancy’s been lapped by Harry “Yes, I am a…
Richard Posner fools me again
I guess that should be Richard A. Posner, because that’s how Dick likes to bill himself on his book jackets. If you read this blog assiduously, you’re probably aware that no one gets my goat quite so often as the learned judge. I never liked his snooty, know-it-all attitude, but it was his little book,…