Fortunately, we don’t have to face that prospect. Thelonious Monk has been in the grave for more than 20 years, but his music lives on, in dozens of his own CDs and dozens more that other musicians have recorded in honor of his genius. But how, you may ask, can one select from the dozens…
The Washington Post, Moving the Damn Goal Posts
If there’s one thing of which the Washington Post never tires, it’s predicting victory in the Iraqi war. The Post’s June 1 lead editorial is headlined “The Iraqi Upturn: Don’t look now, but the U.S.-backed government and army may be winning the war.” Well, don’t look now, but the Post may be lying again. Notice…
Turn Around And She’s Fifty
Where did the time go? OK, Monica hasn’t run up against the big Five O yet, but when she does, well, I think it might go something like this: “Linda, it’s me.” “What a surprise.” “I deserve that.” “You certainly do. Don’t you have a mother? Not to mention an attorney.” “Linda, sarcasm I don’t…
New at Bright Lights: Jean et Charlie
I have a pair of lengthy reviews in the new Bright Lights Film Journal, one of Charlie Chaplin’s least known silent feature, The Circus, and the second a detailed discussion of Jean Renoir’s masterpiece, The Rules of the Game. BL editor Gary Morris gives an overview of the new issue here. NOTE: not all BL…
Turn on, Tune in, Eat a Very Large Box of Vanilla Wafers
Over at “Reason” Magazine, editor Nick Gillespie waxes philosophical over the death of LSD synthesizer and user Albert Hofmann. According to Gillespie, also a user, “Hofmann’s ‘problem child’ (as he wryly dubbed his discovery) has been a major and generally positive influence through many aspects of society … . Blowing peoples’ minds is never an…
Robin Wright’s Magic Disappearing Video, Robin Wright’s Magic Disappearing Story
Readers of the Washington Post were greeted with the following front page story on April 24 by Post reporter Robin Wright: N. Koreans Taped At Syrian ReactorVideo Played a Role in Israeli RaidA video taken inside a secret Syrian facility last summer convinced the Israeli government and the Bush administration that North Korea was helping…
If it walks like a kangaroo
In the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin has an article on Guantánamo that tries very hard to sound even-handed, pumping only slightly for a proposal from Georgetown law professor and former Clinton Administration official Neal Katyal and Harvard law professor and former Bush Administration official Jack Goldsmith, which “is attracting a great deal of attention in…
The Washington Post, searching for purpose
Why are we in Iraq? Good question! Damned good question! Originally, it was stop Saddam from attacking us with “weapons of mass destruction,” nukes in particular, or at least that dreadful yellow cake. There was no chance that Saddam would attack us, of course—he wasn’t that dumb—but the mere fact that he had those WMD…
The Washington Post agrees with me
The Washington Post editorial page, which can be quite prescient when not talking complete nonsense on Iraq, agrees with me that the real outrage emerging from the Hillary/Mark Penn imbroglio is that Penn is being fired for lobbying in favor of free trade with Colombia. The Post makes the achingly obvious case for the free-trade…
David Ignatius, in search of a lead, yet fleeing the truth
“Listening to members of Congress, you might think the biggest problem at the Central Intelligence Agency is that one of its officers destroyed videotapes that showed waterboarding of suspected al-Qaeda operatives.” Really? Which ones have been saying such wickedness? And why isn’t destroying evidence of torture, you know, just a bit of a problem? Yes,…