AROUND THE BEND

What are they thinking? It has me flummoxed. Four out of five Americans disapprove of removing the Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of Alabama's state judicial building. I know America is populated by weirdos. How else do you explain TV shows like Fox's "Miss Dog Beauty Pageant"? But have we gone so completely nuts that we want to install a theocracy? Have we learned nothing from the Ayatollahs? Take a look at walking man. Anyone for putting him in the rotunda?

Postscript: Leave it to Christopher Hitchens for the punchline: "Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it."

Still, Arts Journal reader Shane Hockin has a point:

Both sides are totally overreacting. On one side, one hunk of concrete in a courthouse does not mean the Bible is going to become America's lawbook just because it has religious jargon on it. On the other side, one hunk of concrete taken out of a courthouse does not mean that everyone's religious rights are going to be taken away from them next week.

If we take a single step right or left, everyone gets all up in a hissy fit. Nine times out of ten the hissy fit is unwarranted and we soon step back in the middle again. The whole thing has been blown out of proportion. ... In the end I blame Judge Moore. To make himself look like a martyr he has made a mockery of our judicial system. At least someone had the sense to suspend him. Hopefully soon we can all get on with our lives and worry about important things like ending war, fixing the economy, and getting some tacos for lunch.
August 28, 2003 8:12 AM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on August 28, 2003 8:12 AM.

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