DEFICIT ATTENTION MUST BE PAID

I'm falling down on the job. My staff of thousands reminds me it's been a while since I've paid any attention to Gee Dubya Shrub. The reason, easy to understand, may be summed up in two words: Der Gropenfuhrer. Culifornia's lemmingmeister has loomed so large he's edged li'l Shrub out of the frame. This morning, however, I didn't have to look far to see that li'l Shrub has managed to edge himself back in.

My two favorite punching bags met yesterday and proceded to spin like tops. Li'l Shrub briefed the press afterward with prepared wisecracks about how much he and Der Grope had in common -- marrying well, speaking English badly and big biceps. I don't think his speech writer intended any reference to family values and concern for the culture, or for physical culture, but there you have it. Meantime Der Grope seemed to get his spin signals wrong. "According to accounts on both sides," today's New York Times reported, "little of substance was discussed." But Der Grope told the press they spoke "at great length about the problems of California."

Whom to believe? I suppose it's possible that when li'l Shrub matched biceps with Der Grope, it was code for comparing the California and U.S. budget deficits. Or maybe it was code for the $9-billion energy rip-off of California by Enron and other Texas-based corporations. But I really doubt that. A 15-minute one-on-one, plus 30 minutes in the same room with advisers, and another 15 minutes alone together in li'l Shrub's limo doesn't sound like a meeting of substance so much as a melding of sweet nothings.

October 17, 2003 11:42 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 October 17, 2003 11:42 AM.

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