STRIKING THE GONG

As a recovering workaholic I took an unannounced day off yesterday. I'm also unprepared today. If the world were right side up, it would matter. But it's not. So I'm relying on my old friend Skeets Gallagher to bring me around, and he's no model of efficiency. Skeets is still catching up with last week's Hollywood issue of The New Yorker.

"Just tackled David Denby's piece on Pauline Kael," he says. "Sad. The guy exchanged his chops for the fickle approval of a better writer, and he's haunted. Some guys think Noel Coward was joking when he remarked that 'certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.' If the old darling were around today, he might have said 'certain men, too,' and added 'lobotomized.' Submit or suffer being like everybody else!"

Meantime, Skeets hopes we're all catching Lewis Lapham's editorials in Harper's Magazine. "Lapham is possibly the sanest man ever to emerge from a gated community," Skeets says. I wish I could offer some samples of Lapham's editorials, but I can't find them online. Instead I recommend one of his essays, "The Road to Babylon," which bears out Skeets's opinion, and his most recent book, "30 Satires."

Also, in an entertaining but equally enlightening mode, here's Lapham being interviewed by Jon Stewart a couple of months ago on "The Daily Show." (Beware the pre-interview movie trailer. Arrghhh!) Pushed for political definitions, Lapham equates "dyed-in-the-wool liberals" with "true conservatives" and "compassionate conservatives" with "radical nationalists" aka "utopian anarchists." Makes sense to me.

October 21, 2003 11:03 AM |

Categories:

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 21, 2003 11:03 AM.

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